





























































































































































• 


























































































































































NONASSIMILABILITY OF JAPANESE IN 
HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES 


f U/S. 


HEARINGS 


BEFORE THE 

^ '-hajj vt-s*, n o \as e • 

COMMITTEE ON THE TERRITORIES 


3 > ^ 


HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 

SIXTY-SEVENTH CONGRESS 
SECOND SESSION 


REGARDING 

ANTHROPOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL DATA AFFECTING 
NONASSIMILABILITY OF JAPANESE IN THE TERRITORY 
OF HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES 


JULY 17, 1922 



WASHINGTON 

GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 
3887 1922 





COMMITTEE ON THE TERRITORIES. 

House of Representatives. 

SIXTY-SEVENTH CONGRESS. 

CHARLES F. CURRY, California, Chairman. 

ALBERT JOHNSON, Washington. 

CASSIUS C. DOWELL, Iowa. 

LOUIS T. McFADDEN, Pennsylvania. 

EDWARD S. BROOXS, Pennsylvania. 

JAMES G. STRONG, Xansas. 

JOSEPH MCLAUGHLIN, Pennsylvania. 

ALLEN F. MOORE, Illinois. 

CHARLES L. KNIGHT, Ohio. 

ALBERT B. ROSSDALE, New York. 

DAN A. SUTHERLAND, Alaska. 

HENRY A. BALDWIN, Hawaii. 

Charles F. Curry, Jr., Clerk. 

II 


ZEBULON WEAVER, North Carolina. 
WILLIAM C. LANXFORD, Georgia. 
EDWARD B. ALMON, Alabama. 
PATRICX H. DREWRY, Virginia. 
JOHN E. RANXIN, Mississippi. . 
WILLIAM J. DRIVER, Arkansas. 


LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

b^csivep 

AUQ1S1922 

documents division 


4 4 






GtH^ 55 " 

. c3* 'SL, "7-/L/ C 

CONTENTS. 


Statement by— 

Hon. Charles F. Curry, chairman Committee on the Territories— Page. 

Opening statement. 1 

Historical and anthropological references. 12 

Dr. Ales Hrdlicka. 2 

Authorities quoted: 

Abbott, James Francis, Ph. D., Japanese Expansion and Japanese Policies. 21 

Adams, Francis Ottiwell, F. R. G. S., The History of Japan. 45 

Baelz, Dr. E., professor, Imperial Japanese University of Tokyo, Prehis¬ 
toric Japan (from Smithsonian Report for 1907). 51 

Ballard, G. A., vice admiral (retired), British Royal Navy, The Influence 

of the Sea on the Political History of Japan. 18 

Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, The Anthropological Treatises of (trans¬ 
lated and edited from the Latin, German, and French originals by 

Thomas Bendyshe)...■. GO 

Brinkley, F., captain, R. A.— 

A History of the Japanese People. 23 

Japan, Described and Illustrated by the Japanese. 32 

Primeval Japanese (from the Smithsonian Report for 1903). 32 

Brinton, Daniel G., Races and Peoples. 51 

Chamberlain, Things Japanese. 54 

Churchward, Albert, M. D., M. R. C. P., F. G. S., etc., Origin and Evolu¬ 
tion of the Human Race. 45 

Clement, Ernest Wilson— 

A Short History of Japan. 22 

A Handbook of Modern Japan. 30 

Curry, Charles F., M. C., chairman Committee on the Territories— 

Statement by... 1 

Historical and anthropological references. 12 

Deniker, J., Sc. D., Races of Man. 52 

Encyclopaedia Americana, 1918— 

Volume 2. 61 

Volume 10... 62 

Volume 15. 62 

Volume 19..-. 61 

Encyclopaedia Britannica, eleventh edition— 

Volume 9. 65 

Volume 15. 63 

Flower, W. II., LL. D., V. P. R. S., P. Z. S., etc., Classification of the 

Varieties of the Human Species.. 55 

Giuffrida-Ruggeri, V., The First Outlines of a Systematic Anthropology of 

Asia. 45 

Griffis, William Elliott, D. D., L. H. D., The Mikado’s Empire. 30 

Gulick, Sidney L., M. A., D. D.. Evolution of the Japanese. 31 

Haberlandt, Dr. Michael, Ethnology (translated from the German by J. H. 

Loewe). 52 

Haddon, Alfred C., D. Sc., The Study of Man. 54 

Hamy. Dr. E. T., The Yellow Races (Smithsonian Report, 1895).. 55 

Hara,~ Katsuro. An Introduction to the History of Japan (Yamato Society 

publication). 20 

Hitchcock, Romyn, The Ancient Pit-Dwellers of Yezo, Japan (from report 

of the United States National Museum for 1890). 39 

Hrdlicka, Dr. Ales— 

Note by, in American Journal of Physical Anthropology, April-June, 


The Peopling of Asia (Proceedings of the American Philosophical 

Society, Philadelphia, 1921). 13 

Testimony of... 2 


hi 






































IV 


CONTENTS. 


Authorities quoted—Continued. rage. 

Jeffries, John P., The Natural History of the Human Races. 60 

Keane, A. H., Man, Past and Present. 48 

Koganei, Doctor, Contributions to the Physiological Anthropology of the 

Aino. 55 

Latourette, Kenneth S., The Development of Japan. 20 

MacCaughey, V., Race Mixture in Hawaii. 47 

MacFarlane, Charles, Japan; An Account, Geographical and Historical.... 45 

Matsumoto, H., Notes on the Stone Age People of Japan. 46 

Murray, David, Ph. D., LL. D., 'The Story of Japan. 44 

Ogawa, Chickanosuke, The Form of the Parotid Gland in Japanese. 46 

Okakura, Kakuzo, The Awakening of Japan. 18 

Okuma, Count Shigenobu, Fifty Years of New Japan... 31 

Peschel, Oscar, The Races of Man and their Geographical Distribution 

(translated from the German). 59 

Porter, R. P., Japan, the Rise of a Modern Power. 20 

Prichard, J. C.— 

Natural History of Man. 61 

Researches into the Physical History of Mankind.. 61 

Rein, J. J., Japan, Travels and Researches (translated from the German).. 56 
Senate Document No. 662, Sixty-first Congress, third session, Dictionary 

of Races or Peoples. 49 

Topinard, J., Elimients d’Anthropologie Generate... 58 

Topinard, Dr. Paul, Anthropology. 56, 58 

Treat, Payson J., Japan and the United States. 19 

Tyler, Edward B., D. C. L., F. R. S., Anthropology. 51 

Wells, H. G., The Outline of History. 19 

Yoshisaburo, Okakura, The Life ani Thought of Japan. 30 























NONASSIMILABILITY OF JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE 

UNITED STATES. 


Committee on the Territories, 

House of Representatives, 

Monday , July 17, 1922. 

The committee met at 2 o’clock p. m., Hon. Charles F. Curry (chairman) presiding. 

The Chairman. The Committee on the Territories has jurisdiction over legislation 
affecting the Territory of Hawaii. The total population of the Territory of Hawaii is 
255,912, of-which number the Japanese population is 109,274, according to the 1920 
United States census. Reliable estimates indicate a much larger Japanese population 
in Hawaii, including between 13,000 and 20,000 minors born in Hawaii and now tem¬ 
porarily in Japan for education as Japanese citizens. 

Those born in this country are, of course, under our laws, American citizens, but 
Japanese born in this country are, under the laws of Japan, Japanese citizens. 

The Japanese have proven thus far to be the least willing of any people, or the 
least able, to accustom themselves to our standards of life, modes of living, habits, 
and customs, and have demonstrated that they are not assimilable. 

The Japanese population in the Territory of Hawaii is rapidly increasing, both by 
birth and by immigration. The birth rate per capita is higher among the Japanese 
in the Territory than among any other people. 

Obviously, it will not be many years before the Japanese will constitute a majority 
of the population of the Territory. 

With such a large proportion of Japanese in the Territory they naturally enter very 
largely into many questions of legislation constantly coming before this committee. 

W e will take up legislation in the near future in which these considerations will 
largely enter, and it will be necessary, if we are to act intelligently on the legislation 
that we be fully informed on the anthropology, ethnology, history, modes of life, 
customs, and habits of thought of the Japanese people. 

In investigating the racial homogeneity of the Japanese I found, much to my sur¬ 
prise, I confess, that though the essential details of Japanese anthropology and eth¬ 
nology are well known to science it has never occurred to any gentleman of science to 
fully cover the subject in a scientific paper. Naturally we can not know a people 
thoroughly unless we know the details of their anthropology, ethnology, and history. 

It seemed to me that this information is of such vital importance to this committee 
in legislating intelligently on matters affecting the Territory of Hawaii, many of 
wdiich will come before us in the near future in which we will need this information, 
that we should immediately obtain it. 

The committee through me has requested Hr. Ales Hrdlicka, one of the greatest 
authorities on anthropology, to appear before the committee and give evidence this 
afternoon. Doctor Hrdlicka is the curator of the Division of Physical Anthropology 
of the United States National Museum, Smithsonian Institution. He is also a member 
of the National Academy of Science and the editor of the American Journal of Physical 
Anthropology. His appearance before the committee this afternoon has been author¬ 
ized by the acting secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Mr. W. de C. Ravenel. 

Now, Doctor, it is my desire, if you will be satisfied, to place you under oath. If 
you are willing to take the oath, I wish to say, and it is proper to so advise you, that 
under the law anyone appearing before a congressional committee, properly organized, 
to testify, is given certain privileges and immunities resulting therefrom. There¬ 
fore, in justice to all parties and to yourself, although no inference is to be drawn one 
way or the other from it, attention is called to section 859 of the Revised Statutes, as 
follows: 

“No testimony given by a witness before either House, or before any committee 
of either House of Congress, shall be used as evidence in any criminal proceeding 
against him in any court, except in a prosecution for perjury committed in giving 
such testimony. But an official paper or record produced by him is not within the 
said privilege.” 


1 



2 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


I have quoted this section of the statute to you for your information, and I deem 
it proper to ask you, as you offer yourself here this afternoon, if you are willing to 
be sworn and if you will waive any privileges which may be or are granted by virtue 
of this or any other section of the law? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Yes, sir. 

(Thereupon the witness was duly sworn by the chairman.) 

TESTIMONY OF DE. ALES HRDLICKA. 

The Chairman. Doctor, let me know whether or not you are an expert on an¬ 
thropology. 

Doctor Hrdlicka. I believe I am so considered. 

The Chairman. More particularly are you an expert on the anthropology of the 
Japanese race? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. I should not say more particularly but including. 

The Chairman. I did not mean to suggest that you were more particularly an 
expert along that line than any other, but you are an expert on the anthropology of 
the Japanese race, are you not? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. I believe I am able to give certain facts regarding that and some 
other Asiatic people. 

The Chairman. Please tell the committee how you qualify as an expert? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. By experience, by research, by publications. So far as the 
peoples of the Far East are concerned, including the Japanese, I was obliged to 
become acquainted with them as closely as possible because the problem of their 
origin and racial status enters into the problem of the origin and racial status of the 
American Indian and of the peopling of America, which is my special concern. 

The Chairman. Have you ever been in eastern Asia? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Yes, sir, twice. 

The Chairman. What was your mission? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. I have been twice in the Far East studying the yellow-brown 
peoples, so as to learn their characteristics at first hand in connection with my studies 
on the origin of the American Indian and on the peopling of America. 

The Chairman. When were you in Japan? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. In 1920. 

The Chairman. Did you go as a representative of the Smithsonian Institution? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Yes, sir. 

The Chairman. Did you study the people and their remains sufficiently to be 
able to arrive at scientific conclusions as to their racial identity and composition? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. I did. 

The Chairman. Will you please tell us what are the chief divisions of the basic 
races of mankind? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. We divide mankind into three principal groups. These are the 
"Whites, the Yellow-browns, and the Blacks. 

The Chairman. Are there any other classifications? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Yes. One of the first and most used classifications of mankind 
was that of Blumenbach, made at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Blumen- 
bach divided the human race into five groups, namely, the Caucasian, the Mongo¬ 
lian, the Malay, the American, and the Ethiopian. This classification had great 
vogue and is still used by some men, but to-day the American and Malay are known 
to belong together with the Mongolian in one and the same great race, which we call 
the yellow-browns. 

The Chairman. Are the Japanese people a distinct race of people, a race distinct 
and apart from the rest of mankind? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. The Japanese people are not a distinct race. They may be called 
a distinct group, but they are merely a part of the yellow-brown people or race. 

The Chairman. Are the Japanese people a legitimate part of the yellow race? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. The Japanese people are an inherent part of the yellow-brown 
race. 

The Chairman. Would it be at all possible to regard the Japanese race as a white 
race, or- a Japanese as a white person? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. None of the reliable scientific men of Japan itself nor those of 
anywhere else have ever attempted to make any such classification; they all, with¬ 
out exception, class the Japanese as yellow-brown or mongoloid people. 

The Chairman. Please give the reasons for such classification. 

Doctor Hrdlicka. In the classification of the human races the main criteria are 
the physical characteristics of peoples, which are, of course, the essential character¬ 
istics. We are guided by a large number of features, both of the living as well as of 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


3 


the body remains, and where it is found that a majority of the features that are im¬ 
portant agree in two or more ethnic groups, we are naturally obliged to class those 
groups into one strain or stock, or one variety, or one race—all of these terms being 
interchangeable and used for each other. 

In the case of the yellow-brown people we find that all of them, including the 
Japanese, are characterized by a color of skin which ranges from tawny to dark brown, 
and we therefore call them yellow-browns. We find, in the next place, that all these 
people are characterized by black and straight hair. This hair, moreover, under the 
microscope on a cross section, shows a roundish outline, while the outline of the hair 
of the white man is, on the average, oval, and that of the hair of the black is flattened. 
In the third place, we find that all the yellow-brown peoples, the Japanese included, 
show a scarcity of hair on the body and also a sparse and shorter mustache and beard, 
which even in the cases where it is best developed does not come up to the average 
of the white man. In the fourth place, we find that the yellow-brown people, and 
the Japanese especially, are characterized in a large majority of cases by more or 
less peculiar eyelids, the peculiarity consisting in a fold from the upper eyelid over 
the inner corner of the eye on each side, a fold known as the epicanthus. This con¬ 
dition is found in white people and negroes only very exceptionally, and then only 
in the young. 

In the yellow-brown peoples it is more or less common, according to the group, even 
in adults. It is particularly prevalent in the Japanese and the Chinese. This is a 
condition which gives rise to the term “oblique” or “Mongolian” eye. As a matter 
of fact, the eye is not oblique, but-on account of the peculiar formation of the upper 
eyelid the slit between the two lids becomes more or less oblique, the outer corner 
being higher than the inner. The whole constitutes one of the most obvious of the 
so-called mongoloid characteristics, and, together with the color of the skin and char¬ 
acteristics of the hair, is quite sufficient to entirely differentiate the peoples possessing 
them.from the whites and placing them among the “Mongoloids” or yellow-browns. 
In the fifth place, we have a remarkable feature which is common to a large percentage, 
or to from 50 to 80 per cent, of the yellow-brown peoples, and which is rare among white 
peoples and also black peoples, amounting to only a few per cent in either—and that 
is a peculiar hollow nature of the buccal surface of the upper incisor teeth, and 
particularly the medians. This condition of the teeth I described last year in the 
American Journal of Physical Anthropology, which may be referred to for the de¬ 
tails.—Hrdlicka (Ales): Shovel-shaped teeth. Am. J. Phys. Anthrop., 1920, Vol. Ill, 
No. 4, pp. 429-466. 

In the sixth place, the Japanese and all the other members of the yellow-brown 
race differ from the whites and also from the blacks, but especially from the whites, 
in the various features of their face. Their face is flatter, the lips, due to a slightly 
greater prognatism, are frequently somewhat fuller; the nose, especially in the 
Japanese, is commonly smaller and of a different contour, the glabella region (the 
region above the root of the nose) is flatter, as compared with the averages in the 
white race. Naturally these features do not hold equally good for all the branches of 
the large yellow-brown race, such as some of our Indians. 

The Japanese and other yellow-brown peoples differ also from the white people 
in various other physical characteristics, and apparently they also differ from them, 
more or less mentally. These more detailed, and especially the psychological 
features are difficult to define without technical language, or with finality, many 
of them being still under investigation. 

The Chairman. But they do exist? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. There are indications to that effect. 

The Chairman. Can you therefore state positively that the Japanese are not white 
people? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. There can hardly be anything in anthropology more positive 
than the fact that, on the whole, the Japanese are yellow-brown, or Asiatic, or “ mon- 
goloids”; though the Japanese, just like the Chinese, the Koreans, and all other 
branches of the yellow-brown people, like the larger groups of our own race, contain 
some foreign admixture. 

The Chairman. The Japanese can not be classed as whites? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. They can not be scientifically classed as whites. 

The Chairman. Will you please tell us who were the aborigines of the Japanese 
islands, the islands which now make up the Japanese Empire? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. The aborigines of Japan came, so far as known, to Japan in the 
neolithic times. They, according to all indications, already belonged to the same 
strain of people, i. e., to the yellow-browns, but they were not yet the Japanese. 
Following them, a little later, came another people, the so-called Ainu or Ainos. These 
people evidently carried an admixture of European people. In other words, the 


4 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


Ainu, according to our best possible conclusions to-day, were a mixed group partly 
carrying yellow-brown blood and partly carrying some old white blood. Before 1000 
B. C., according to Torii, of the University of Tokyo, one of the best of Japanese archaeol¬ 
ogists [Torii (R.), Les Ainou des lies Kouriles, J. Coll. Sci. Univ. Tokyo, 1919, XLII, 
337, 337 ff] there came into Japan, probably from somewhere in northern Manchuria 
and over Korea, a stream of Tungus, and. these were the originators, one might say, 
of the real Japanese. They began to drive away the Ainus and at the same time to 
mix with them, and this kept on until about 800 B. C., when a new stream of Tungus, 
called the Yamato Tungus, came into the southern islands of Japan through Korea. 

These were the Tungus who established, in connection with those who preceded 
them and the native population that they mastered, the Japanese empire, and from 
that time on the development of the Japanese nation proceeded by the multiplication 
of these invaders, by the absorption of the remainder of the preceding Ainu, and 
by receiving from time to time accessions from other yellow-brown peoples like the 
Chinese, Koreans, and, in all probability, even some of the yellow-browns from the 
south, from Formosa, southern China, or even from the Philippine Islands, who 
brought with them a little blood of the Negrito. Still later on there came the contact 
with the whites (1542—), which, however, has never been strong; since then, and 
particularly since the Russian advance into the Far East in the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries, there has been some mixture, especially among the Ainu 
with whites. The Japanese of to-day represent a mixture of all the elements here 
mentioned, but a large preponderance of these were simply different groups of the 
yellow-brown race. The Japanese have in their veins—just as the Chinese have, 
just as doubtless the Koreans have, or the Mongolians, or Siberian Tartars have— 
some blood that may be called white, but the quantity of this, on the whole, is so 
small that except in a few families it is wholly imperceptible and, of course, can not 
change the racial status of the people. 

The Chairman. What proportion of white blood would you say was in the modem 
Japanese race? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. The proportion of white blood differs according to classes and 
according to districts. In by far the larger part of Japan, where the contacts have 
been nil or very small between the two races, the mixture is practically nil; in the 
port cities it may amount, at the most liberal estimate, to perhaps something like 5 
per cent; in individual families it may, of course, be as high as 50 per cent. 

The Chairman. Taking the Japanese race as a whole, what would the white blood 
average, in your opinion? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Not more than, say, that of the negro blood among the Mediter¬ 
ranean whites. In a large part of Japan there has been no contact whatever with 
whites and the people are not admixed. In places like the general districts of Tokio, 
Yokohama, Kobe, Shimonoseki, and the Kurile Islands, white people have had more 
access and there is some mixture. A trace of white blood remains probably in some 
of the Japanese as a result of their old admixture with the Ainu, but this mustbe small, 
for the number of thus incorporated Ainu was according to all accounts not a large one. 

The Chairman. Did the Ainu people originally occupy all the islands of Japan? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. With the remnants of the preceding people they occupied, 
according to evidence so far unearthed, all of the islands, but in a sparse way. 

Mr. Swing. How many would you estimate? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. I could not tell you that; but at most probably not over a few 
tens of thousands. Their remains, while widely spread, are not abundant. 

The Chairman. As I understand there are about 2,000 left? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. There are only a few hundred left of pure blood. Personally 
I think there are not over 200 or 300 pure bloods left, and even that may be too great 
an estimate. 

The Chairman. Are there any of the other aborigines? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. None. The earlier aborigines were incorporated in the Ainu 
and the remnants of the Ainu with the aboriginal strain were, except for the little 
remnant in the north, incorporated into the Japanese. 

The Chairman. Do the Ainu keep themselves separate at present or do they inter¬ 
marry? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. They keep themselves fairly separate. However, they are 
something like our Indians and the white people; they intermix where in contact with 
others. 

The Chairman. Could the Ainu be possibly regarded as whites? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. No; but they are probably partly whites and partly yellow- 
brown. 

The Chairman. What would you say was the percentage of white people among the 
Ainu that are living in the Japanese Islands? 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


• Doctor Hrdlicka. There is a considerable Russian admixture among the Ainu that 
are left living in the Japanese islands, including the Kuriles and Saghalien. This is a 
recent white admixture. The old white admixture among them dates back to perhaps 
3,000 years ago or more, and was less marked. Judging from the fearures of the females 
and children, I do not think it could have been at the utmost more than a half and 
half. ’ 

The Chairman. And that is pretty well bred out by this time? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. It is not bred out among the Ainu; they represent now what we 
would call in the United States, because of a mixture between the whites and negroes, 
“mulattoes”; they are between yellow-brown and white. 

The Chairman. Can the few hundred Ainu that are living at the present time be 
classified as whites? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. It would be greatly straining a point to classify them as whites. 
Some students of anthropology, on account of their showing certain characteristics 
of white people, such as a rather profuse beard and fairly horizontal eyes, were uncer¬ 
tain as to-just where to place them. One or two wanted to make a new race out of 
them; one or two proposed to regard them as white, and some consider them simply 
yellow-brown with aberrant characteristics. However, I think the best scientific 
opinion to-day would be that they are merely an ancient mixture of the two yellow- 
browns and some old whites, both of which to some extent are manifested in their 
present-day appearance. 

The Chairman. But they are not white people? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. They are certainly not white people. 

The Chairman. And could not be classified as free white people? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Not without doing violence to the facts. Their most serious 
students, such as Koganei, Torii, Torok, have never attempted such a classification. 

The Chairman. Have you studied the Ainus as a scientist from skeletal remains, 
books, etc.? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Yes, sir. 

The Chairman. Would you say that they are Caucasians or Mongolians? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. I should say they are intermediate people, a result of ancient 
mixture of the two. 

The Chairman. What would the preponderance of blood be? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. That is hard to say; but possibly somewhere near half-and-half. 

The Chairman. Would you classify them as a part of the white race or of the yellow 
race? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. They are neither pure whites nor pure yellow-browns, and 
should not be classified with either race. 

The Chairman. They are like the mulattoes in this country? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Yes, sir; they are intermediates. 

The Chairman. Where are the remnants of the Ainu race located in Japan at the 
present time? Where do they live? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. They are located on the island of Yezzo and in the Kuriles 
Islands; there is also a group of them on the Saghalien Island. 

The Chairman. What percentage of the Ainu blood would you say appears in the 
Japanese of to-day? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. That is impossible to say; but it is not large. 

The Chairman. Is it an appreciable amount? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. It is not plain, and many Japanese have probably no such blood. 
Some might say there was Ainu blood in those Japanese who have larger beards—for 
there are occasionally Japanese who are fairly well bearded; but even in these cases 
the beard shows the essential characteristics <^f the yellow-brown man, and it is doubt¬ 
ful if it has been influenced by any Ainu mixture. 

The Chairman. But even of these the percentage is small? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. The percentage is certainly in the minority.^ 

The Chairman. There would not be over 1, 2, or 3 per cent of the Ainu blood in 
the Japanese at the present time? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. I do not see how there could be any more, if that much. 

The Chairman. It would not change the Japanese people in any regard or in any 
number from Mongolian or yellow-brown to white? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. No, sir. It would no more change the Japanese than a similar 
admixture, for instance, changes the Mongolians proper, or the Chinese, or the Malays, 
all of whom have some admixture of white blood. 

The Chairman. Have you traced the immigration into Japan from China, Korea, 
and Siberia? I want to know the blood of the groups of which the Japanese are 
made up. 


6 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


Doctor Hrdlicka. I can only say this: That all of the other groups, witji the 
exception of the Ainus, that ever so far as known came to Japan, were of the yellow- 
brown stock, even though they may have carried different kinds of admixture. There 
is no such thing in the world, and has not been for many thousands of years, as any 
pure large group of people, whether white, yellow-brown, or any other, except, per¬ 
haps, the blacks in the center of Africa. 

The Chairman. What preponderant stock of the Mongolian race were the Japanese 
derived from? Were they Sibiric or Sinitic, and what do we mean by the terms 
Sibiric and Sinitic? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Well, we do not subdivide them in that way; we simply classify 
them all together as yellow-browns and speak of them by the political or tribal groups 
to which they belong. 

The Chairman. With the exception of the Ainu all of the ancient immigration 
into Japan was of the yellow-brown race? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. All of the known immigration into Japan and all known intro¬ 
ductions into Japan—for sometimes they were introduced as captives—has been of 
the yellow-brown peoples. 

The Chairman. What about the immigration of Chinese and Koreans into Japan 
and their intermarriage with the Japanese? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Both Chinese and Koreans were repeatedly introduced into 
Japan and mixed with the population. They were invited or brought as captives. 
There is, for instance, a record of no less than 10,000 Chinese troops being brought at 
one time as captives into Japan and there intermarrying with the local people. (See The 
Eta; by C. Kaneko, Tokyo Jinrui gakkai hokoku, 1887, II, No. 13.) Their remains 
are to this day known as the Eta. Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries 
the Japanese were to eastern China much that the Normans were from the eighth 
century onward to the western coast of Europe, and they brought many Chinese 
women and children, and there were other introductions. 

The Chairman. Was there any introduction of Malay blood; and if so, how did that 
occur? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. There may have been, but it is not historically known; that is, 
there are no historic records of it. There are some indications, however, that some 
people did come into Japan from the south. The habits of the Japanese in the southern 
islands resemble in some respects the habits of the people of the south, and there is 
among the southern Japanese people occasionally a plain trace of an admixture of 
the negrito, which, of course, could only have come from the south. 

The Chairman. The Malays and negritos are not whites? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. No; the negrito is black and the Malay is yellow-brown. 

The Chairman. The Malay is of the yellow-brown race and the negritods black? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Yes, sir. 

The Chairman. The various peoples of which the present Japanese race is made 
up entered Japan in the manner you have indicated and intermarried, and from that 
intermarriage the present Japanese race have been evolved? 

Dr. Hrdlicka. Yes, sir. 

The Chairman. And that Japanese race- 

Doctor Hrdlicka (interposing). Japanese group; I would not call it race. 

The Chairman. Well, Japanese group; that is right. This Japanese group is 
classified as a part of the yellow-brown race? 

Dr. Hrdlicka. Yes; they can only be classified as a portion of the yellow-brown or 
mongoloid race. 

The Chairman. Could any white people have reached Japan in prehistoric times 
without our knowing of it? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. No trace has ever been found of any such people penetrating as 
far east into Asia. 

The Chairman. You say that Blumenbach divided the people of the earth into five 
great races, while you divide them into three? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Yes, sir. 

The Chairman. He divided them into Caucasian, Mongolian, Malay, American, 
and Ethiopian. 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Yes, sir. 

The Chairman. Can you tell us why that classification should be modified, or why 
the races of mankind should be divided into three instead of five? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Simply because we have found that the characteristics of the 
Malay and the American Indian are so close to the characteristics of the yellow-brown 
race that we can not conscientiously keep up that subdivision. 

The Chairman. The American Indian is of the yellow-brown race? 



JAPANESE IN' HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


7 


Doctor Hrdlicka. Yes, sir; he is of the yellow-brown race. He is one group or a 
cluster of groups of that strain. He came from Asia; but he has evidently been comino- 
for many centuries, or even thousands of years, bringing physical as well as linguistic 
and cultural differences which he further developed in America; but he belongs to the 
same general yellow-brown race. 

The Chairman. Cuvier divided the people of the earth into white, yellow, and 
blacK races, and that is the way you divide them. 

Doctor Hrdlicka Yes. The term “race” is, of course, applied also at times to 
minor subdivisions of mankind, and in that case we have many “races,” but we are 
now speaking of the main subdivisions. 

The Chairman. There are many subdivisions of the white race and manv sub¬ 
divisions of the yellow race? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Yes, sir; there are many subdivisions of the whites as well as of 
the yellow-browns. 

The Chairman. The Japanese are of the yellow-brown race? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Yes, sir. 

The Chairman. Referring to the physical characteristics of the Japanese, are they 
different in their frame and legs from white people? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. They have numerous differences. They have, for instance, 
what we call relatively short legs and a relatively long trunk, but those are character¬ 
istics that are not racially distinctive. There are many such characteristics of 
secondary importance. They strengthen our opinion, but are not decisive of them¬ 
selves. 

The Chairman. Please tell us something regarding your observations of the skin 
of the Japanese and of their color. 

Doctor Hrdlicka. The Japanese range from yellowish white to dark brown. The 
predominant shades are tawny to medium brown. 

The Chairman. What Japanese scientific authorities can you name that consider 
the Japanese people as belonging to the mongoloid or yellow-brown race? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. I would say, in a word, all of those who have been occupied in 
Japan in a really scientific way with the anthropology of their people. Those that I 
may name offhand are Koganei, Tsuboi, Torii, Kaneka, Ogura, Matsumoto, Adachi. 
The statements of these authorities are not always direct, but they are all to the same 
end and purpose. No reputable man of science in Japan has ever claimed that as 
a group the Japanese were anything else than yellow-brown or “Mongolian.” 

The Chairman. The differences between the original races of mankind can be 
differentiated from skeletons or bones, can they not? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. To some extent. 

The Chairman. The races of mankind are different in the form of their bones and 
of their skulls, are they not? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. To certain degrees. 

The Chairman. There are important differences, are there not? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Yes, sir. 

The Chairman. The main characteristics of the skull of the white race, of the 
yellow-brown race, and of the African race are different, are they not? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Yes, sir. 

The Chairman. Can you explain these differences? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. The most important craniological differences between the three 
different races are essentially those of the face. In the yellow-brown peoples, as con¬ 
trasted with whites, we find that the face is, on the whole, more flat; that the malar 
bones are, in general, larger and more protruding; that the region above the eyes, and 
especially above the region of the nose, is characteristically flatter—which is especially 
the case among the Chinese and Japanese; the nasal aperture in the yellow-brown 
races, except those in the northernmost regions (Eskimo), is generally wider than it 
is in the whites; and the protrusion of the upper dental arch forward (alveolar prog¬ 
nathism) is on the average somewhat greater in the yellow-browns than in the whites. 
In addition there are many differences between the skeletal remains of the two races, 
but these become apparent only in studies of large series of specimens. And there 
are certain anomalies, such as, for instance, the os japonicum, which are more frequent 
in one race than in the other. 

The Chairman. Is there a peculiar pigmentation of the skin of Japanese infants? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. In the yellow-brown peoples there is a pigmented bluish spot, 
found over the sacrum in new-born infants. It is called the sacro-lumbar or Mongolic 
spot. This spot also occurs in peoples of other races, but is very rare in the case of 

whites. 

The Chairman. When it does occur in whites, it is regarded as an evidence of ad¬ 
mixture of blood, is it not? 


8 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


Doctor Hrdlicka. Recently there have been published observations on a number of 
cases of this “spot” in children in the clinics of Vienna. All of the people in whose 
children the spots were found came from Hungary, and the suggestion was advanced 
that the spots may be a consequence of the admixture in the Plungarian of Mongoloid 
people who, as is well known, invaded the region in the tenth century. 

The Chairman. Wherever it occurs, this spot is an evidence of the admixture of 
Mongoloid blood? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. It is supposed so by some authorities. The real explanation of it 
is probably that long before man began to evolve into man, there was present in this 
region in his ancestors a darker pigmentation, just as there is among some animals, and 
the trace of it which persists becomes more apparent in'the dark-pigmented races than 
in the light. An admixture of a darker race such as the yellow-brown with the white 
would naturally increase the frequency of these spots. 

The Chairman. Has there been an admixture of white blood in the Japanese race 
in modern times? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. There has been but very slight admixture of that nature, con¬ 
sidering the number of Japanese. The Japanese have for a long time excluded the 
whites, and they had also the isolation afforded by great distance. 

The Chairman. They prohibited immigration of other races into Japan, and they 
had no intercourse with the outside world, outside of Korea and China, for many 
hundreds of years, until it was opened up by Perry in 1856? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Yes. 

The Chairman. For a thousand and more years before Perry’s coming there was 
no appreciable admixture of blood with whites on account of the isolation of their 
country and their prohibition of immigration? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Yes, sir. During two thousand years and over they were mixing 
only with the people of Korea and China. 

The Chairman. You mentioned the lack of hair on the face of yellow-brown 
people. Is there any noticeable lack of hair on other parts of the body? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Yes, sir; I mentioned that also, I believe. There is a general 
scarcity of hair in the yellow-brown people on the body. There is hair on the pubis, 
but it is not as profuse as in people of the white races. 

The Chairman. Doctor, do you believe that the assimilation of the Japanese is 
possible in this country by the process of intermarriage? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. In answer to that I mav only say this: It is not impossible, but 
evidence shows that a Japanese assimilates with considerable difficulty; he learns the 
language with difficulty; his mentality appears to be somewhat different; he is not 
what one would call a “good mixer.” This is observable to some extent even in Asia 
among the peoples with whom he is closely related. 

The Chairman. Would such an admixture, if possible, result in the deterioration of 
the blood of the American people? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. That is a very delicate question and one which I could only 
answer by giving my personal opinion and which I would rather not put on record. 

The Chairman. What is your personal opinion? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. My personal opinion is this: That just as the black people 
represent in mental potentiality, say, only 80 per cent of the average of white people, 
so the yellow-brown people represent, on the average, perhaps 95 per cent of such 
potentiality, and that 95 united with 100 will never give 100 again. But there are 
many individual men of the yellow-brown race who are- 

The Chairman (interposing). High-class people, of course. 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Highly developed mentally and highly capable mentally. 

The Chairman. Do you think such an admixture would help the yellow race? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Yes, decidedly; provided it was a mixture of a wholesome 
character. 

The Chairman. Would the product of such intermarriage, during the course of 
years, become white? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. No; unless the admixture of the yellow-brown blood was so small 
that it would practically disappear by dilution, the progeny would never be per¬ 
fectly white. 

The Chairman. It could never be true white? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. No, unless the admixture of the yellow-brown was so small that 
it would become so diluted in the course of centuries that it would no more be recog¬ 
nizable or in evidence. 

The Chairman. Intermarriage between the black and white races and the yellow 
and white races usually results in the production of a mongrel hybrid, does it not? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. In the production of a mixture. 

The Chairman. The mixture that results would not be pure blood? 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


9 


Doctor Hrdlicka. No, sir. 

The Chairman. The mixture could under no conditions become pure blood. 

Doctor Hrdlicka. That is right, except in the course of a long time through suffi¬ 
cient dilution and elimination. 

The Chairman. Where did Japan get its culture? Was it a development or was 
it borrowed from different nations? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. It is both. The Japanese came into their islands as relatively 
civilized people, and when they came to Japan they also found a fair degree of cul¬ 
ture among the Ainu. On these bases, and with the help of the Chinese and Koreans, 
they developed a culture of their own. They developed a culture of an advanced 
character. 

The Chairman. Since the opening of Japan by Perry the Japanese have borrowed 
from the United States, Germany, and Great Britain scientific inventions, labor-saving 
machinery, and, to a certain extent, the application of electricity and steam to in¬ 
dustry; and army and naval tactics, arms, and armaments. Have the people them¬ 
selves also assimilated the spiritual and higher elements of civilization or simply the 
material benefits? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. I can, again, only give a very guarded personal opinion. It is a 
very difficult matter to justly gauge a people in these respects^. But it seems to me 
that the Japanese as a whole are a proud people; I also know they are very thrifty, 
clever, and energetic. A combination of these characteristics would naturally, on 
one hand, make them feel badly inferiority to any other people, and, on the other 
hand, would lead them to all possible means for the removal of such inferiority. 
Adding to this that they are very adaptable and able mechanically, and that they 
had a highly developed culture in many respects before the opening of Japan by Perry, 
we can readily understand how they could in such a short time make such apparently, 
and even really, rapid strides in development in many lines. But they have not yet 
generally and fully caught up to white people, and they evidently have difficulty in 
keeping pace, because the white man does not wait on the road but keeps on advanc¬ 
ing. This is true, probably, in most lines of industrial as well as social endeavors and 
it is also true, to a large extent, of professional and scientific pursuits. There are 
eminent scientific men of Japanese birth, but on the whole the state of science in 
Japan can not as yet be fully compared with that in the United States, France, Eng¬ 
land, or Germany. 

The Chairman. The Japanese developed an art peculiar to themselves, did they 
not? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Japanese art is very largely based upon Chinese art, but they 
have taken the Chinese and Korean art and developed it further along their own lines. 

The Chairman. The Chinese and Koreans were really their teachers in art? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Yes, sir; that is historic. 

The Chairman. And then they developed from that? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. They developed partly from that. 

The Chairman. The written language of Japan is based on the written language 
of China, is it not? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Yes. 

The Chairman. It is based on certain Chinese ideographs, with some abbreviations 
of the clumsier characters, known as Kana? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Yes, sir. 

The Chairman. Do you know whether Korea got its culture from China? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. l£orea got a part of its culture from China, while a part of it is 
indigenous. Korea was for a long time in close relation, even tributary, to China; it 
also had many Chinese settlers, but outside of that Korea had an earlier culture of 
its own. 

The Chairman. But Chinese culture had an influence on the Korean culture? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Decidedly. 

The Chairman. And the Chinese and Korean culture had an influence on the 
Japanese culture? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Yes, sir. 

The Chairman. Neither the Filipinos, the Malays, the Chinese, the Koreans, nor 
the Japanese, nor the Mongols, nor the Siberian tribes, can be classed as whites? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. No., 

The Chairman. They all belong to the yellow-brown race? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. They all belong to the yellow-brown or mongoloid race. 

The Chairman. Why is the race called “mongoloid,” Doctor? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. It is called “mongoloid” because of the great prominence that 
the Mongols assumed in the Old World by their invasions of eastern and central 
Europe and Asia Minor, particularly in the thirteenth century. 

The Chairman. That is the reason they are called a mongoloid race? 


10 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


Doctor Hrdlicka. Yes. The Mongols having made such an impression upon the 
white people of Europe, subsequently all Asiatic peoples showing their physical 
characteristics were called mongoloid peoples. That is how the term “mongoloid” 
race came about. It does not mean “derived from Mongols”; Mongols are but one 
of the larger groups of the great yellow-brown race. 

The Chairman. The term “Mongolian” was applied to all of the yellow-brown 
people? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. To all of the yellow-brown people, yes; except that originally 
the Malays and the American Indians were kept separate, until they were sufficiently 
studied and shown to possess the same basic characteristics, and to have come from 
somewhere in Eastern Asia. 

The Chairman. If there are any questions I have not asked which would bring out 
the information we ought to have I wish you would suggest them to me, and establish, 
if you can, the genetic relationship of the Japanese by somatological evidence, or by 
any other scientific method you have not covered. 

Doctor Hrdlicka. I believe I have covered the ground as far as I feel safe. Some¬ 
thing might be said about the differences in mentality between the yellow-brown and 
white people and especially between the Japanese and white people; but such differ¬ 
ences which I believe do exist, and may be of important character, are hard to define. 
Psychological research has not yet advanced far enough to exactly precise these 
differences. They are generally felt and known, I think, both by the whites and 
Japanese who come in contact with each other, but they can not be defined in so 
many words. 

The Chairman. What is a white man? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. A white man, in the simplest definition of the word, would be 
one who has lost most of his original pigmentation and has therefore come near in the 
color of his skin to a depigmented or white condition. 

The Chairman. What causes the depigmentation? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. This depigmentation took place in Europe, especially in north¬ 
western Europe, due, we believe, to environmental conditions. 

The Chairman. The white race has developed in Europe and particularly in 
northwestern Europe? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Yes; particularly in central and northwestern Europe. The 
so-called blonde or whitest part of the white race owes its origin evidently to the 
climatic and environmental conditions in central and northwestern Europe following 
the last glacial recession. Environment here is meant in the broadest sense of the 
word, which comprises clothing, housing, food, atmospheric conditions, habits of life, 
and all that, even diseases. 

The Chairman. How far back can you trace the white race? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. The white race has had a very gradual development from 
perhaps 25,000 or 30,000 years ago. Before that time we have sufficient ground for 
the belief, I think, that there was as yet nothing like a real white man; he was still 
more or less brownish or tawny, and it was only as he progressed northward, following 
the receding ice of the last ice recession, and came into regions that were damp, where 
he had much less average sunlight, where also he had to protect himself a great deal 
more by clothing and -by housing from the elements, and where, in addition, other 
conditions were different, that the pigment became gradually less and less. The 
pigment was only there for protection, and it became less as the need of it disappeared. 
Nature does not tolerate for any length of time what becomes useless, and so the pig¬ 
ment was gradually reduced until the condition became hereditary, and man came 
to constitute what we now call the white race. 

The Chairman. The races of mankind have developed from one basic race? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. The races of mankind, according to all evidence, developed from 
one ancestry. 

The Chairman. And that ancestry- 

Doctor Hrdlicka (interposing). That ancestry was what we call the early man in 
western Europe and parts of northern Africa. 

The Chairman. Of what color was he? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. The color of that man, we believe, was brownish or brown. 

The Chairman. And the races of the earth as we now know them represent a process 
of division and development from one parent stock through twenty-five or thirty 
thousand years? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. The races as we know them now, except, perhaps, the African, 
which may have branched off a little earlier, are the results of environmental and 
hereditary processes and causes operating through the last 25,000 or 30,000 years. 

The Chairman. If it took about 30,000 years to develop the three main races and 
the different families of those three races, it would not be possible by an intermixture 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


11 


of races to breed them back to the original race, or to develop the other races into 
white peoples? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. No, sir; they all advance in their own direction. There is no 
recession except by degeneration, and no possibility of a mixture of two races becoming 
again a pure race, one or the other. 

The Chairman. The intermarriage of races would not be a good thing for civilization, 
would it? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. That is a question. The intermarriage of races under favorable 
conditions, or where the healthy elements of any two races combine under good con¬ 
ditions, might in a way be looked upon as an improvement, because the result would 
be a bettering of the poorer race; but, of course, the result will never be equal to the 
better of the two races. 

The Chairman. That is, it might improve the lower race, but it will not improve 
the higher race? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. That is true. 

The Chairman. The admixture of the white race with any other race would result 
in a deterioration for the white race, while it might result in an improvement of the 
other race? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. I do not see how it could result in any benefit to the white race. 

The Chairman. It would probably result in the deterioration of the white race, 
while it might possibly benefit the inferior race to a certain extent? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. It would in all probability retard to some extent the progress 
of the white race, which might, of course, be compensated by the improvement of 
the other race. 

The Chairman. It might improve the lower race, but not the higher race? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Yes, sir; that is true. Of course if there was only one single 
race in the world, through the mixture of the inferiors with the superiors, there would 
be produced an equalizing effect which might be of advantage to the world as a whole. 

The Chairman. But it would certainly result in a lowering of the higher parts of 
the race? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. That would seem to be the only possibility. 

The Chairman. What was the original homeland of the Tungus people? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. The original home of the Tungus people was Manchuria, and 
possibly eastern Mongolia and southeastern Siberia. 

The Chairman. I would like to know whether the study of anthropology has been 
your life work? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. It has been ever since I began research work. I began as a 
medical man. 

The Chairman. You are a physician and surgeon? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Yes, sir. 

The Chairman. Where did you study? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. New York and abroad. 

The Chairman. And you became interested in ethnology and anthropology- 

Doctor Hrdlicka (interposing). Very shortly after my graduation—1891. 

The Chairman. And you have devoted your life to that work? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Yes, sir. 

The Chairman. About how long? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. Exclusively from 1894. My research work in anthropology 
began in 1894 as associate in anthropology of the State Pathological Institute of New 
York. In 1899 I began my research work among Indians and other primitive people, 
in connection with the American Museum of Natural History, being placed in charge 
of the anthropological work for the Hyde expeditions. In 1903 I was called to the 
Smithsonian Institution to organize in the National Museum a Division in Physical 
Anthropology, and I have been here ever since. 

The Chairman. In the near future you are going to Brazil and Europe—for what 
purpose? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. As a delegate from our institution and the State Department to 
t he International Congress of Americanists at Rio de Janeiro. I will then go to Europe 
to examine the more recently found remains of early man; that is, the skeleton re¬ 
mains of men of geological age. 

The Chairman. Have you published anything on the subject of the far eastern 
peoples; or have you otherwise dealt with the question? 

Doctor Hrdlicka. For the last few years 1 have been giving lectures on the “Origin 
and Composition of the Various Peoples of the World” to postgraduate classes in the 
School of Diplomacy and Jurisprudence at the American University. As to publica¬ 
tion, my most recent contribution to the subject is an article on the “Peopling of Asia, ’ 
published last spring in the Transactions of the American Philosophic Society. 

The Chairman. Are the Japanese in any way descended from the Aryans? 


12 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


Dr. IIrdlicka. In no way whatsoever. No Aryans, so far as known ever reached 
even so far as the more eastern part of central Asia. They extended from about 1200 
B. C. onward from or through the regions now comprised in southern Russia into 
Medea, Persia, and India. There are no traces that they ever reached in any numbers 
even as far as what is now known as the Chinese Turkestan, and no trace exists of their 
ever having penetrated farther east. The Japanese, according to all indications, had 
already reached the Japanese Islands before the first movements of the Aryans from 
Europe took place. 

The Chairman. That is all. Thank you, Doctor. 

In connection with the effort to obtain all of the information possible and necessary 
for the use of the committee, I have personally reviewed or had reviewed every work 
on anthropology, ethnology, and history printed in English and available in the Library 
of Congress touching on the subject and even some works that were not available in 
the Library of Congress, but obtained from other sources; and in some instances have 
had passages from important works in French and German translated. 

All of the authorities classify the Japanese people as of the yellow-brown race or 
the Mongolian race. 

There has been marked difference of opinion as to who were the real aborigines -of 
the Japanese Archipelago. The Ainu people were regarded by most as the original 
aborigines, or at least, as the first to arrive whom a trace could be found of. An inter¬ 
esting revelation on this point comes from Romyn Hitchcock, who holds that the 
Tsuchi-gumo, I believe probably with goud reason, were the real aborigines. In the 
legends of the Ainu we find tales of these people. 

Next came, without question, the Ainu, and following the Ainu, the Tungus from 
the north, and later the Yamato Tungus, who came into the southern islands through 
Korea. 

The authentic history of Japan dates back to only 500-600 A. D. Prior to that we 
are lost in a maze of legends, traditions, and myths. And even at that comparatively 
late period and until recent days the history of Japan is filled with legendary accounts 
and myths that have been most confusing to some historians. 

Intelligent research, we must remember, has gone on only since Admiral Perry 
opened up the Japanese Empire to the world. 

Recent investigations by distinguished anthropologists, ethnologists, and archae¬ 
ologists have revealed to us much of that past that has heretofore been either a closed 
book or an account shrouded in a deep vale of oriental mythology. 

These investigations are by no means completed, but they have progressed to the 
point where distinguished anthropologists are able to speak authoritatively, and in 
this connection I may say that careful inquiry among men of science has elicited the 
information that nowhere is there an anthropologist able to speak with greater authority 
on this subject than Doctor Hrdlicka, who has just given us the benefit of his knowl¬ 
edge gained through long and tedious research. 

“Who’s Who in America,” 1920-21, gives the following biography of Dr. Ales 
Hrdlicka: 

“Anthropologist; b. Humpolec, Bohemia, March 30, 1869; s. Maximilian and 
Carolina H.: academic education in Bohemia; M. D., New York Eclectic College, 
1892; New York Homeopathic College, 1894; Maryland Allopathic State Board, 1894; 
carried on investigations among insane and other defective classes, New York State 
service, 1894-1899; associate in anthropology, New York State Pathological Institute, 
1896-1899; studied in Paris University and Anthropological School, first half 1896; 
married, 1896. Tour over European prisons, insane asylums, and museums, 1896; 
in charge physiological anthropology of Hyde expeditions for American Museum of 
Natural History, 1898-1903; assistant curator in charge of Division of Physiological 
Anthropology, 1903-1910, curator since 1910, United States National Museum an¬ 
thropological expeditions; to Mexico, 1898; southwestern United States, 1899-1900, 
and Mexico, 1902-1905; Florida, 1906; Wisconsin, South Dakota, Washington, Cali¬ 
fornia, Arizona, 1908; Egypt, the Balkans, Russia, 1909; Argentina, Peru, Panama, 
Mexico, 1910; Europe, Siberia, Mongolia, 1912; Peru, 1913; Minnesota, 1915; Dakotas, 
Minnesota, Florida, 1916; Tennessee, Oklahoma, 1917; member board of managers, 
American School of Research; judge of anthropological exhibits, St. Louis Exposi¬ 
tion, 1904; author of exhibits of physiological anthropology and prehistoric American 
pathology, San Diego Exposition, 1915; associate editor of the American Naturalist, 
1901-1908; secretary Nineteenth International Congress of Americanists, 1915; sec¬ 
retary Section I anthropology, Second Pan American Scientific Congress, 1915-16; 

secretary committee on anthropology of the National Research Council, 1917-; 

member committee on anatomy, United States Naval Reserve Force; fellow of the 
American Academy of Arts and Sciences; member of the Association of American 
Anatomists, American Anthropological Association, Washington Academy of Sci- 




JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


13 


ences; Anthropological (ex-president) Biological and Medical Societies, Archaeolog¬ 
ical Institute of America (life); corresponding member Bohemian Ethnological 
Society, Royal Bohemian Association of Sciences, Bohemian Academy; titulary 
member Paris Societe d’Anthropologie; corresponding member Anthropological 
Gesellschaft, Vienna; Societe de3 Americanistes, Paris; Societe Italiana di Antro- 
pologia, Florence; Societe d’Amis d’Historie Natural and d’Anthropologie, Moscow; 
Academia Nacional de Historia, Colombia. Author of papers and memoirs on the 
anthropology of the defective classes; on physiological, medical, and anthropological 
observations among Indians; on antiquity of man in North and South America and 
in general: on the osteology of the Indian, Esquimo, the American whites and Ne¬ 
groes; on anthropology of the Egyptians; on research work in Peru, Mexico, Asia; 
on the genesis of the American Indian; History of Physical Anthropology in America, ” 
etc. 

If the committee would care to hear it, I will read excerpts from a number of works, 
historical, anthropological, and ethnological, that seemed to me particularly worthy 
of our notice. Most of these are recent works, or comparatively recent, as the best 
information on the subject is the latest information by reason of recent research 
sifting fact from fable, but I bring in, also, other works because the early fables and 
traditions throw considerable light on the modern customs. You will note that not 
all of these works agree in every detail, and, indeed, few agree in every detail, but 
they all do agree on the classification of the Japanese people as of the yellow-brown 
race, and, indeed, every scientific man who has made a study of the subject, including 
scientific men of Japan agree on this point. 

I will read excerpts from historical works and, following that, from anthro¬ 
pologies and ethnologies, but first, I shall read an important contribution on the 
subject by Doctor Hrdlicka, which is as follows; 

[Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, 1921.] 

THE PEOPLING OF ASIA. 

[By Ales. Hrdlicka. Read April 21, 1921.] 

The peopling of Asia, as may well be appreciated on reflection, constitutes one of 
the greatest problems of anthropology. The solution of this problem could not have 
been approached wi£h any great hope of success until lately, for it involves in no small 
degree the peopling of the whole world. Even now many of the details are lacking 
or obscure; but through collateral as well as direct research sufficient light, it seems, 
has by this time been obtained for the possibility of our attempting, with due reser¬ 
vations, of some general deductions. 

It is quite certain that these deductions are bound to receive substantial modifica¬ 
tions as anthropological knowledge of the Asiatic countries, and especially that of 
early man, accumulates; they can for the present be little more than working hy¬ 
potheses. Nevertheless, what will be here outlined is supported by many facts of 
considerable weight. 

Looking at the subject of the peopling of Asia with due perspective, we may readily 
come to the first definite conclusion, which is that the vast continent could not have 
been peopled either from the north or the east, and that consequently it could only 
have been peopled from the south, southwest, or west. From this it logically follows 
that the eastern, central, northern, and northeastern Asiatic populations must have 
been ethnic extensions from other parts of the continent. And as all these popula¬ 
tions possess certain characteristics in common, which enable science to classify them 
as “mongoloid,” it is further plain that they could not have come from more than 
one direction or from more than one ancestral land or source. 

These mongoloid populations comprise collectively considerably more than one-half 
of the total population of the Asiatic continent, and if we can trace their derivation 
we shall have solved a very important part of the problem of the peopling of Asia. 

The first question that obtrudes itself on this attempt is whether or not these mongo¬ 
loid peoples were really the first inhabitants of the countries which they occupy 
to-day. To this it may be answered that there is no valid evidence whatsoever to 
the contrary. The various branches of the mongoloids are, it may be safe to assume, 
not of equal antiquity; there are older and younger branches of the stock. But out¬ 
side of some marginal or recent mixtures none of these peqples show any evidence of 
having fused with any geologically more ancient or racially different man in the 
regions which they hold as their own. Added to this we have the corroborative evi¬ 
dence of a total lack, so far, of substantiated remains of early man in these territories. 
It is true that relatively small parts of Asia have as yet been thoroughly explored, 
but the archeological and related explorations by the. Russians, Japanese, and others 


3887—22-2 



14 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


represent already a large amount of labor with completely negative results so far as 
the presence of early man is concerned in the lands occupied by the mongoloid people. 
A few isolated supposedly “paleolithic” implements and a problematical piece of a 
sacrum, believed to be ancient by a few of the Japanese, are insufficient to sway the 
balance. The natives, particularly in China, have long been in the habit of collect¬ 
ing and selling everything in the way of old and odd objects, including stone imple¬ 
ments, and examples of the latter may not seldom be found—at times nicely mounted— 
in the markets of the Chinese cities; but they have never brought, so far as could be 
learned by interested foreigners, any implements or objects that could be identified 
as geologically ancient or premon^oloid, nor have any other indications of preneolithic 
sites been anywhere discovered m these countries. There is, therefore, to this day 
no evidence of any earlier man in all this vast mongoloid region, which comprises 
over four-fifths of Asia, or the whole territory to the east of the Urals and the Caspian 
and to the north of the Himalayas, besides the great islands. 

Where did these mongoloid peoples come from to their present homes? Their tradi¬ 
tions, such as they are, lean generally to the west or northwest. Nothing points to a 
possibility that they might have come across the great mountain ranges from the 
south, and. they did not come along the coast or by the sea from the southeast, for the 
Malayan people of these territories, though mongoloid, are, according to all indications, 
only extensions of the stock into these regions from farther north. Everything points 
to the probability of the invasion having proceeded from the north southward. We 
have a very valid evidence for this in the presence in these regions of the scattered 
Negrito. The Negrito is a weak race physically as well as mentally. In both respects 
he is decidedly inferior to the Malay. His wide scattering over the islands of south¬ 
eastern Asia, with traces of his presence over a considerable part of the southern 
stretches of the mainland, indicates plainly that the Negrito must at one time have 
occupied these regions unopposed, for he could not possibly have prevailed over and 
penetrated through any stronger people. It was only subsequently that he was partly 
annihilated, partly mixed with the vellow-brown Malays, and partly scattered by them 
into the mountains and least desirable places as they advanced into his territory from 
the north. And this must have been about the same time'that the streams of the 
ancestors of the present Hindu population reached and settled in India, breaking up 
the Negrito in that sphere and preventing the Malay from extending also into that 
territory. In Hither India, in Persia, and in Asia Minor there are no traces of any 
mongoloid population except such as can be accounted for by border extensions o 
through historic introductions. 

We have, therefore, nothing substantial on which to base a possible origin of the 
mongoloid peoples in the southern or southwestern parts of Asia. 

The mongoloid peoples, we have now seen, can not be regarded as having evolved 
in their present abodes, for notwithstanding certain speculations there is not a trace 
of any evidence and very little probabilitv that there has ever been anything in the 
central or northwestern parts of the continent from which man could evolve, and 
there are no indications that man has lived in these vast regions except in the rela¬ 
tively recent post-glacial period. 

The mongoloid people, it is quite plain, did not originate where they are. They 
could not possibly have come from the east or from the north, and we have just seen 
that there is no likelihood of their coming from the south. This leaves but one broad 
avenue of approach, which is that from the west, through the great flat lands to the 
north of the Himalayan and central Asiatic mountains. And this connects the ances¬ 
tors of the mongoloid peoples inevitably with the prehistoric westernmost Asiatic and 
through these with the old European peoples; while chronologically they can only 
connect, judging from the evidence of their main physical traits, with the late Paleo¬ 
lithic and the succeeding periods. 

So much for the present for the mongoloids, and with these out of the way there 
remains to be considered only the peopling of southern and western Asia. 

This part of the problem is again plainly divisible into that relating to the presence 
of the Negrito and that of the Mediterranean, Semitic, Aryan, and mixed populations. 

According to all indications the Negrito was the first human inhabitant in any num¬ 
bers of a large proportion of—if not of the entire—southern and southeastern coasts of 
Asia and of the neighboring as well as some more distant islands, reaching to New 
Guinea and possibly even to parts of Australia. Whence he came, how he came so far, 
and how he succeeded in occupying such extensive regions, including what now Jlre 
far separated islands, are largely questions for future determination; but the facts show 
that all this has been accomplished. 

It now seems most probable that the Negrito is racially connected with the Central 
African small black man, and that he extended over the great territory he once covered 
mainly over land, and that either over Arabia and by scouring the seacoast, or over 
land extensions and connections which may have since disappeared. Still he may 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


15 


have become enouph of a navigator to reach at least, some of the islands where he left 
his traces over the seas—the blacks of Micro- and Melanesia who have considerable 
Negrito blood have shown themselves to be quite capable of that. That the Negri tor 
did not. originate separately from the African blacks is amply evident from the many 
characteristic lesemblances he bears to the latter, and that, he did not originate in 
Asia and then cross to Africa we may decide on one hand from his parentage to the 
Negro and on the other from the improbability of his succeeding in penetrating, weak 
as he was, from elsewhere into the heart of the African continent. 

In his extension eastw ard and southward the Negrito may or may not have met with 
other human beings. He may possibly have met with some representatives of what is 
now commonly referred to as the “Australoid ” type of man. Certain it is that he met 
with no large numbers, for these would have effectually checked his extension. Also, 
wherever better preserved, the Negrito shows still a pure type, without any signs of 
ancient admixture with such heterogeneous population. It seems most likely there¬ 
fore that the territories over which the Negrito succeeded in extending were devoid 
at that time of other population. This enabled the small, poorly eouipped black man 
advancing always in the direction of better prospects and least resistance, to cover in 
time the enormous area over which we find his remnants to this day. Just when this 
happened and how long it took can scarcely be conjectured; but it was not very long, 
speaking in the geological or evolutionary sense, for the Negrito is not a geologically 
ancient type, besides which he has modified but. little in his own way since his separa¬ 
tion from the mother stock of blacks. 

These deductions concerning the Negrito incidentally raise one great question, 
which is that about the place of man’s origin. It has so far generally been believed 
that the cradle of mankind lay somewhere in southeastern Asia or what are now 7 the 
ad ; oining archipelagoes, for it is these regions in wdiich live to this day two of the 
anthropoid apes, in which existed once, as shown by the Sivalik finds, still other 
anthropoid forms, and which gave us the remains of the Pithecanthropus, a being that 
so closely approaches to the ideal “missing link,” half ape or half man. These facts, 
together with the existence of apparently favorable environment for further evolution 
in the direction of man in the regions under consideration, have produced a pow erful 
predilection in scientific minds in favor of these regions as the site of man’s evolution. 
Nor is anyone in a position to-day to gainsay the possibility that the early phases of 
human evolution have taken place in w 7 hat, is now Malaysia and southeastern Asia. 
The existence there of the Pithecanthropus is undeniable evidence that whatever may 
have happened subsequently or elsewdiere, far-reaching steps in the direction of man 
once were taking place in these parts of the w 7 orld and reached to at least half of the 
wav. 

But after Pithecanthropus there is a great void, and the next beings in the line of 
man’s ascent are found far off, in western and soiithv estern Europe. The Heidelberg 
man. judging from the great massive iaw. was still an exceedingly primitive human 
being—perhaps hardly > et deserving the term human; yet he lived already in western 
Europe, or over 7,000 miles away from Java, the home of the Pithecanthropus. It is 
true that according to our calculations there must have elapsed between the period in 
which lived the Pithecanthropus and that in which lived the man of Heidelberg at 
least 150.000 years and possibly a good deal over; but the task remains of bringing 
such primitive beings over such a distance and in that particular direction. Still such 
a feat can not be said to have been impossible. There is no lack of examples of a 
similarly great and even greater spread of various animals. It is essentially a question 
of numbers, food, and time. But why the direction? 

It would seem that under conditions propitious enough to evolve man in south¬ 
eastern or southern Asia he would have found these regions suitable for considerable 
local multiplication and for the peopling of the whole of southern Asia if not the entire 
continent. But so far there is a complete lack of evidence of any such multiplication, 
and there is a substantial certainty that, early man w r as not able to people the rest of 
Asia. 

It is plain that there is a great gap in our knowledge at this very important stage in 
man’s history over which we are still obliged to pass by mere speculation. Such, 
speculation involves in the main two alternatives. The first is that man originated in 
southeastern Asia; that for some reason—doubtless environmental—he was prevented 
from spreading northward; but that he spread relatively rapidly westward until he 
reached the v estern limits of the then habitable parts of Europe. His route may have 
led over the then connected Asia Minor and the Balkans or along the southern shores of 
the Mediterranean: and from causes unknowm he appears never to have acquired a lasting 
foothold or any numerical importance in the regions from which he came or w r hich he 
traversed. The last proposition, if correct, w’ould be nothing to winder at, for w e have 
good evidence of the fact that until toward the end of the glacial times man had not. 
been able to reach any numerical importance even in Europe. 


16 


JAPANESE IN PI A WAIT AND THE UNITED STATES. 


The second hypothesis would be that the successful line of man’s ancestry originated 
not in Asia but in Africa, where we also know of fossil anthropoids and where there 
live to this dav the two anthropoid apes nearest to man, namely the chimpanzee and 
the gorilla. Unless man’s origin should be regarded as a pure accident, which seems 
unjustifiable, it may well be assumed that conditions such as favored the differentia¬ 
tion from anthropoids towards man in one localitv existed also in other regions. The 
assumption of man’s origin in Africa would imply the conclusion that the progeny 
of the Pithecanthropus had not reached the stage of man and has become extinct near 
to where it developed; while the man originating in Africa, could over the land con¬ 
nections at Gibraltar and elsewhere, much more readily have reached southwestern 
Europe, which is the site and cradle of the main stages of his further development. 

Some difficulty in these connections seems to be presented by the Australians, and 
the ‘•Australoid” type wherever met with in the seas off southeastern Asia. Due to 
the occasional presence in this type of certain primitive physical features such as the 
protruding brows and jaws, the type as a whole has come to be looked upon as some¬ 
thing very primitive and very ancient. Some of the earlier anthropologists would 
doubtless have found little difficulty in accepting the notion that the “ Australoid” 
man may be a local descendant of the early man of southeastern Asia. But to this 
there are valid objections. The “Australoid” man is not a uniform type; he is ad¬ 
mixed more or less according to localities with the Negrito, and possibly even with 
some of the Indo-Europeans. When we discount these admixtures, there is left what 
in no wise could be regarded as a separate species or even a distinct variety of man, 
but a man in all essentials like the western man of say ten to twenty thousands of years 
ago. He represents a type such as must have been common in Europe and the rest 
of the inhabited parts of the Old World from the Aurignacian to the earlier Neolithic 
times. That such similarities could have developed independently in two environ¬ 
mentally so widely different regions as man’s western habitat of that time and the 
tropical and semitropical seas and lands off southeastern Asia, is to say the least, very 
improbable. But the only alternative is that the “Australoid” man is the same as 
the later prehistoric western man, that he is derived from the same body, and that 
he has reached Australia and wherever else he may have existed in relatively late 
times by extension or migration. He may well represent a strain of fairly late man of 
southwestern Asia or northern Africa, which had penetrated into Malaysia and Aus¬ 
tralia before or perhaps through the Negrito. 

In addition to the “Mongoloid ” and “Australoid ” populations of Asia and the South 
Seas, Jffiere are to be considered the actual peoples of southern and western Asia in¬ 
cluding Asia Minor and the Arabic peninsula. 

These seemingly so complex populations may in reality be readily classified and 
accounted for. They are essentially recent and mixed populations. The elements 
entering into their composition in the order of their importance are: The Mediterranean, 
the “Semitic,” the “Aryan,” the Negrito and the Yellow-Brown; to which in the north 
are added the transitional (white-Mongoloid) Tatars and Turkmen. Among the 
Semites, both actual (Beduins) and the old (Palestine, etc.) there is also some ad¬ 
mixture through Egypt and Ethiopia of the Sudanese and East African Negro. In 
Galatia, Phrygia, and some other localities of Asia Minor and in the sub-Caspian regions 
finally, there are small groups of people of direct connections with or derivation 
from known peoples of Europe. 

According to growing evidence the southwestern and westernmost portions of Asia 
have been peopled by extensions from Europe and possibly Africa during the later 
Paleolithic and Neolithic periods; and they doubtless have received wave after wave 
of extension or invasion of prehistoric and early historic peoples from over the Balkan 
Peninsula, the Caucasus and from the Caspian-Aral-Turkestan regions. These peoples 
annihilated, admixed with or drove to least desirable spots whatever there may have 
been of the Negrito and of the “ Australoids, ” except in Australia; in the east they 
impinged upon the yellow-brown man coming from the north and stopped him, mixed 
with him along the lines of interpenetration, and, admixed with him, invaded and 
peopled parts of the Philippines, part of Micronesia, and the Polynesia. 

Resuming now the subject of the peopling of Asia, it may be "briefly outlined as 
follows: 

The question of man’s origin in southeastern Asia or the adjoining lands is still 
doubtful; man may possibly have originated in some more western portion of the 
northern or semitropical belt. 

No trace of man corresponding in type and antiquity to the Heidelberg or the 
Neanderthal Man of Europe has as yet been discovered in any part of Asia, and it 
may be regarded as more than doubtful whether these early forms could have reached 
these regions. Judging from some archaeological facts and from the presence of the 
“Australoid ” type in the South Seas, it seems probable that western man reached these - 
regions at a period corresponding to the later Paleolithic epoch from Europe, western¬ 
most Asia, or northern Africa. 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


17 


All that part of the continent of Asia north of the Himalayas was unpeopled until 
say, twenty to fifteen thousand years ago. An extension northward of any possible 
earlier man from the south would have been prevented partly by the mountains 
and partly by a semidesert condition of the great loess areas of ('hina. 1 

The earliest people of whom there is any evidence who reached and peopled the 
southern coasts and as yet undetermined parts of the Asiatic mainland and what are 
now the off-lying islands, were the Negrito of probably African derivation. 

Not long before or after the Negrito there was an extension into the South Seas of 
the “ Australoid ” strain of western population. The rest of the population of southern 
Asia is the result of wave upon wave of extension and invasion from the west, north¬ 
west, and the northern inland regions, with subsequent admixtures. 

About the same time or but shortly after the Negrito reached southern Asia there 
was taking place a larger movement of yellow-brown population from the more west¬ 
ward drying up regions into eastern Asia and over southern Siberia. This popula¬ 
tion gradually spread over the whole Asiatic continent north of the Himalayas and, 
multiplying, began to extend in all directions—through the Negrito area to the south 
and southeastward, peopling the southeastern parts of the continent with Malaysia; 
it peopled the Nippon Archipelago; and as food was diminishing or pressure behind 
became greater, it extended along the coast northward to the northeastern limits of 
the continent, whence it passed on gradually and repeatedly, over the various prac¬ 
ticable routes, still farther eastward, reaching and eventually peopling America. 
Still later the surplus of this brown population in the south, admixed already to some 
extent with the Negrito as well as with a more important contingent of the more recent 
near-white-man types from the west, peopled Micronesia and Polynesia. Meanwhile 
the older and darker yellow-brown wave was, according to all indications, followed 
by successively lighter, though still yellow-brown, waves of people from the west, 
which, penetrating among and mixing with the old population, gave us such actual 
ethnic units as the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Tartars. Remnants of the oldest 
brown wave are still discernible in the living population in many parts of this vast 
region, particularly in Mongolia, Tibet, the Sagnalien and the Formosa Island, as 
well as in parts of Siberia. 

All these yellow-brown people could have had but one far-back parentage—that 
of the early Neolithic western Asiatics, and with these that of the Paleolithic Euro¬ 
peans. They unquestionably must proceed from the same source as the white race, 
but they separated from the mother stock before or during the earlier parts of the 
period of its differentiation into the white Europeans. 

A word at the conclusion about the origin of the Negrito and Negro. They, too, 
upon a critical examination, present ample evidence of original identity with the old 
Mediterranean and European stock. They are no separate species, and the main 
physical differenced between them and the rest of mankind are but skin deep. Their 
forbears must have separated from the general parent stock at a distant, and yet not 
excessively distant, period—-not earlier in all probablity and rather later than the 
second half, the latter Neanderthal part, of the Paleolithic period; and passing 
deeper into Africa they eventually became modified through environmental influences 
into the smaller and the taller Negro. 

The cradle of humanity therefore, according to present indications, was essentially 
southwestern Europe, with later on the Mediterranean Basin, western Asia, and 
Africa. It is primarily from Europe and secondarily from these regions that the 
earth was peopled. And its peopling, so far as can now be determined, appears on 
the whole to be a matter of comparative recency. 

That earlier man was not able to people the globe before was in all probability due 
to his insufficient effectiveness. Up toward near the end of the glacial times and 
his old stone culture, he had eviedntly all he could do to preserve mere existence. 
Only after he advanced mentally and in culture so far that he could control his en¬ 
vironment sufficiently to secure a steady surplus of births over deaths was he able, 
and in fact became obliged, to extend over other parts of the earth. 

The cause of man’s peopling the world, it may well be assumed, was not a mere 
wish to do so, but chiefly necessity arising from growing numbers and correspondingly 
diminishing supply of food. It was this in the main which led him to spread; it 
was this which eventually led him to agriculture. And his spread—for it was a spread 
rather than “migrations”—followed the three great laws of spread of all organized 
beings which are: (1) movement in the direction of least resistance; (2) movement 
in the direction of the greatest prospects; and (3) movement due to a force from 
behind, to compulsion. 

The peopling of Asia is a key to the problem of the peopling of all that part of the 
world lying east and southeast of that continent, in particular of the Americas; and 


1 That such a condition of these vast regions did exist during the earlier part of the Quaternary, is attested 
by the results of paleontological and geological researches of Dr. J. G. Anderson, of the Geological Survey 
of China. 









18 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


even our imperfect knowledge of the events shows how vain it would be to expect 
to find in this latter part of the world traces of man of any great antiquity (p. 535ff). 

IVice Admiral G. A. Ballard, C. B., of the Royal British Navy. The Influence of the Sea on the Political 

History of Japan. New York, 1921.] 

The archipelago, or chain of islands, which forms the home of the 55,000.000 souls 
comprising the Japanese race is approximately 1,150 English miles in length and lies 
roughly in a northeasterly and southwesterly direction, with its southern extremity 
nearest to the Asiatic continent, from which it is separated by the Straits of Tsushima, 
exactly 100 nautical miles in width, the Peninsula of Korea forming the opposite shore. 
The three principal islands, in succession from the north, are known on British 
Admiralty charts as Yezo, Nipon or Honshu, and Kiushiu; and although these are not 
the native names, nor, indeed, the names used by European writers, they have ob¬ 
tained so general an acceptance by this time that they will be used in the pages which 
follow. Yezo, which has always been the least developed of the three, was not fully 
occupied nor governed by the Japanese till a much later period than the other two and 
is still partly populated by a distant aboriginal people. Nipon is the largest, and has 
always been the seat of government during the period of authentic history, whether 
the actual administration was in the hands of the Mikado himself or of the Shoguns 
who usurped his power. Kiushiu alone of the three has known the tread of an invad¬ 
ing army, but the duration of that infliction was brief. 

All three are possessed of many fine natural harbors and offer the facilities for mari¬ 
time enterprise which breed a seafaring coast population, and all are in parts rugged 
and mountainous inland. A large proportion of the Japanese race, therefore, are 
either mountaineers or sea fishermen, the representatives of many generations brought 
up under natural surroundings of a description which, judging from the history of the 
ancient Greeks, or the. Norwegian Vikings, or later of the Japanese themselves, tend 
to develop a fighting stock. (Ch. 1, p. 13.) 

It is true that certain classes of alarmists, with little knowledge of naval affairs but a 
rich endowment of nervous imagination, persist in regarding a conflict between Japan 
and the United States as one of the probabilities in the not very remote future. But 
surely such a view is not very complimentary to the intelligence and self-control of 
two great peoples. Theodore Roosevelt never agreed with it, and no man was ever in 
a better position to judge or more ambitious for the good of his own country. Causes 
of friction may undoubtedly exist, but none lying beyond hope of settlement if 
reasonable forbearance is exercised on both sides. A section of Japanese public 
opinion is aggrieved because their countrymen receive different treatment as regards 
residence in the United States to Europeans, and claim an equality on the grounds 
that Japan is a member of the League of Nations. 

At first sight this resentment, may seem natural, but they should study history, 
which will teach them that the roots of this matter lie far deeper than the nicely 
balanced theories of international lawyers. Racial differences are inborn and con¬ 
stitute a factor in human affairs that can not be abolished by speechmaking round a 
conference table at Geneva. To ignore their existence is to depart from practical 
politics in settling international relations. It is not a question of the superiority or 
inferiority of this people or that, but simply a question of fundamental difference of 
mentality or social instincts. The Japanese need fear comparison with no race in 
the world as a nation of virile, courageous, and high-minded men, exercising a greater 
influence on human progress in their own quarter of the globe than anyone else. 
In their patience, industry, and indifference to enervating material comfort, their 
standards are above those of most other lands. But four-fifths of the population of 
the United States are of pure European extraction, and history makes it abundantly 
clear that Europeans and Asiatics are so constituted that they can never inhabit the 
same country in peace unless one or the other occupies the position of an inferior 
race (p. 292 ff). 


[Okakura-Kakuzo. The Awakening of Japan. 1921.] 

We are both the cherished child of modern progress and a dread resurrection of 
heathendom—the yellow peril itself (p. 4). 

The Korean Peninsula had probably originally been colonized by us during pre¬ 
historic ages. Archaeological remains in Korea are of exactly the same type as those 
found in our primitive dolmens. The Korean language remains, even to-day, the 
nearest allied to ours of all the Asiatic tongues. Our earliest traditions tell of the 
god Sosano, brother of ofir imperial ancestress, settling in Korea; and Dankun, first 
king of that country, is considered by some historians to have been his son. The 



JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


19 


third century discloses our Empress Zhingo leading an invasion of the peninsula in 
order to reestablish our sovereignty, threatened by the rise of a number of small 
independent kingdoms (p. 203). 


[Prof. Payson J. Treat, of Leland Stanford, Junior, University, 1921. Japan and the United States, 

1853-1921.] 

The Japanese to-day are, like all the other great peoples of the world, a mixed 
race. The predominant characteristics are Mongolian in spite of the possible proto- 
Caucasian element. But this racial mixture occurred at so remote a time, certainly 
long before the Christian era, that we are justified in speaking of the product as a 
Japanese race (p. 5). 

Concerning the racial origins of no great people do we know so little with exactness 
as of the Japanese. Many are the theories which have been advanced, slight is the 
evidence by which some of them are supported. On some points there is now a 
general agreement and these will serve every purpose of this sketch. The earliest 
inhabitants were probably a primitive people known as the Ainu. Concerning 
their racial origin there is much speculation * * *. 

At a later period the islands were invaded by Mongolian peoples from Asia, by 
way of Korea, and about the same time other invaders appeared from the south, 
of Malayan origin. Before the dawn of history the newcomers had driven the Ainu 
back, out of Kyushiu and Shikoku, and the battle line was drawn in the northern 
part of Honshiu. These successful warriors we call the Japanese. The greater part 
of them seem to have come from the continent, but the influence of the southern • 
group seems to have been far greater than their numbers. And these conquerors 
no doubt took the women of the vanquished as wives and thus introduced an Ainu 
strain into the Japanese blood (p. 4). 


[H. G. Wells. The Outline of History. New York, 1921.] 

The pioneer country, however, in the recovery of the Asiatic peoples was not 
China, but Japan. We have outrun our story in telling of China. Hitherto Japan 
has played but a small part in this history; her secluded civilization has not con¬ 
tributed very largely to the general shaping of human destinies; she has received 
much) but she has given little. The original inhabitants of the Japanese Islands 
were probably a northern people with remote Nordic affinities, the Hairy Ainu. 
But the Japanese proper are of the Mongolian race. Physically they resemble the 
Amerindians, and there are many curious resemblances between the prehistoric 
pottery, etc., of Japan and similar Peruvian products. It is not impossible that they 
are a back flow from the trans-Pacific drift of the early heliolithic culture, but they 
may also have absorbed from the south a Malay and even a Negrito element (Vol. 11, 
p. 464). 


[American Journal of Physical Anthropology, U. S. National Museum, Smithsonian Institution, 
Washington, D. C., April-June, 1920.] 

NOTES. 

The Japanese have begun the publication of a magazine to be known as the 
Tongwon, the express object of which is to “cultivate friendly feelings of Koreans 
toward Japanese by proving that the two peoples have come from a common father, 
and that they are in consequence brother races.” The periodical “is to be devoted 
to purely scientific researches, having in them no grain of political meaning. It is 
still open to question whether or not Japanese and Koreans have a common lineal 
father, but Mr. Kato and his clique intend to start and follow their researches on the 
supposition that the two races are so connected, making it their aim to prove the 
validity of the theory of Japanese Koreans being of the same race. If the contrary 
is proved, as a result of the scientific researches we are to follow * * * we will at 
once discontinue the publication of the magazine.” 

The first copy of the magazine has reached the editor, and it would be interesting 
to refer to the “scientific researches” therein contained, but it is printed wholly in 
Japanese and Korean. (Vol. 3, p. 283.) 





20 JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


[Katsuro Hara, Yair.ato Society publication, An Introduction to the History of Japan. New York and 

London, 1920.] 

Who are the Japanese? We are almost at a loss to decide to which assertion we 
can most agreeably give our countenance with the least risk of receiving an imme¬ 
diate set back. So I shall be content to state here only those hypotheses which may 
be considered comparatively safe, although they may not rise far above the level of 
conjecture (p. 30). 

It is sometimes argued that we had only one stock of people in Japan besides 
the Ainu, and that that stock is the homogeneous Japanese. This view is not avowed 
openly by any scholar worthy of mention, for it is an undeniable fact that in the 
historical ages groups of immigrants, intentional as well as unintentional, happened 
to drift into Japan now and then, not only from Korea and China, but from the 
southern islands also, though not in great numbers, and the occurrence of migrations 
similar to those in historic ages can not be absolutely denied to prehistoric times. 
Besides, anyone who pays even but cursory attention to the physical features of the 
Japanese can easily discern that, besides those who might be regarded as of a genuine 
Korean or Chinese type, there are many among them who have a physiognomy quite 
different from either the Korean or the Chinese, though one might be at a loss to 
tell exactly whether the tincture of the Malayan, Polynesian, or Melanesian blood is 
predominant. In face of such diversity, too clear to be neglected, none would be 
bold enough to assert that the Japanese has been a homogeneous race from the begin¬ 
ning (p. 34). 


[R. P. Porter, Japan, the Rise of a Modern Power. Oxford, 1918.] 

The Japanese islands were originally inhabited by a race the descendants of whom 
are supposed to be the Ainu, found to-day in the islands of Hokkaido or Yezo. At a 
very early date Mongolians and Malayans seem to have invaded the main island of 
IJonshiu, south of Yezo, and the island of Kiushiu, south of Honshiu. A narrow strait 
divides Kiushiu from Honshiu, and between Korea and Kiushiu lie the islands of 
Tsushima and Iki, affording stepping-stones for Asiatic emigrants. Mongolians may, 
however, have crossed from Siberia to Sakhalien and thence by Yezo reached Honshiu, 
or from Kamchatka arrived in Yezo via the Kurile Islands. The Malayan ancestors 
in the Japanese population perhaps made their way northeastward from the Philip¬ 
pines or Borneo by Hongkong, Formosa, and the Loo-Choo Islands to Kiushiu (p. 1). 


[ Jenneth S. Latourette, professor of history in Denison University, The Development of Japan, published 
under the auspices of the Japan Society. "New York, 1918.] 

In at least three places they (the Japanese Islands) so nearly touch the continent 
that communication is comparatively easy—Sakhalin on the north, Kiushiu and Korea 
in the center, and Formosa on the south. Of greatest importance has been the second 
for it was partiythrough Korea that the ancestors of the Japanese reached the islands. 
It was through Korea that the main stream of Chinese and Indian culture flowed to 
Japan. It is through Korea that to-day commercial intercourse with the continent 
most easily takes place. Through Sakhalin may have come some aboriginal tribes 
from the north, possibly the ancestors of the modern Ainu. Through Formosa by 
way of the Riu Kiu Islands Malay elements entered, and possibly some strains of 
blood from the mainland (p. 4). 

The length of the chain of islands, combined with the proximity to the coast of 
Asia, is a factor of importance. In prehistoric days it meant that from many different 
points diverse racial elements could find their way into the islands. Thus through 
Sakhalin have come people akin to those of Siberia, through Korea various folk from 
Central Asia, China and Korea, and from the south some "of Malay blood. In more 
recent times this relationship to the continent has placed Japan in a position to domi¬ 
nate nearly all of the east coast of Asia (p. 5). 

Of the early history of Japan we know but imperfectly. Traditions, myths, and 
fragments of poetry and religious ritual have told us something. Ethnology and 
archeology are telling us a little more. The most ancient written records now in 
existence did not take their present form until the eighth century A. D. The oldest 
of these, the Kojiki (records of ancient doings) was furnished in 712 and was a written 
transcript of the ancient traditions and records from the memory of one man who had 
made a business of collecting them. The next, the Nihongi (chronicles of Japan), was 
completed in 714 and was the work of a number of officially appointed scholars'who 
carefully examined existing recprds and traditions. It was more profoundly in- 




21 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 

fluenced by Chinese thought and language than was the Koiiki, but in both works 
the original stories were made to conform to the ideas and surroundings of their com¬ 
pilers. The myths and traditions as thev have come down to us give a most naive 
account of the origin of the land, the people, and the State (p. 9). 

From these stories, reinforced by ethnology and archaeology, it is possible to recon¬ 
struct with some degree of accuracy the main outlines of the beginnings of Japan. 
The earliest inhabitants of the islands seem to have been a race called ‘‘cave men.” 
Their very existence is questioned. If they were a real people the only remaining 
traces of them are pit dwellings and shell mounds, and they must have been in the 
most primitive stages of culture. Entirely historical, however, are a strong race of 
aborigines (called Yemishi in the Japanese records), probably the ancestors of those 
Ainu who are still to be found on the island of Yezo and the Kuriles—a hairy, flat- 
faced people, at present mild tempered. Of their origin nothing certain is known; 
some have supposed that they came from northern Asia. When the first Japanese 
found their way to the islands these aborigines were in possession of most of the land. 
They were a fierce, rough lot, still in the stone age. They were cannibals and appar¬ 
ently were without family life. They offered a sturdy resistance to the more nearly 
civilized invaders and were driven back and subdued only after long centuries of 
warfare, warfare which continued to within the past few hundred years. They left 
permanent marks on their conquerors, chiefly in an admixture of blood, which s 
strongest in the north. 

The Japanese of to-day are a mixed race, and are the result of the coalescence of 
several migrations. We can not trace with certainty all the streams, but there must 
have been several of them from various sources, reaching the islands at different times. 
Not only do traditions and myths indicate a composite origin, but archaeological 
remains, consisting principally of graves and their contents, unmistakably show it. 
The amalgamation, however, has never been entirely completed; from the earliest 
times there have been two pronounced types—the aristocratic, slender of limb and cf 
light complexion, and the plebian, stocky and dark. • The migration came from the 
continent for the most part, chiefly by way of the Korean peninsula, but also from 
the south. There are strong strains of Malay blood, which are apparently due to 
settlements partly from the continent and partly from southern islands. Tradition, 
in fact, tellfe of a people (Kumaso) in Kiushiu which some have thought to be to-day 
represented by a race in Borneo and to have come northward along the chain of islands 
from the south. They w T ere conquered by the Japanese from Yamato and very possibly 
amalgamated with them. Too little is known yet of the ethnology of the Far East 
to enable us to determine accurately all the racial affiliations of the Japanese. Some 
of the groups that have entered into the formation of the Chinese are evidently repre¬ 
sented, but there are differences which must be accounted for on the basis of origin 
as well as of environment. The Manchu-Korean and the Malay stocks predominate, 
with the balance in favor of the latter, but there are as well traces of infusion of other 
blood; part of it Mongol an d part of it still undetermined. Some enthusiasts have even 
seriously claimed to have found an Indo-European admixture. In language the 
Japanese more nearly resemble some of the groups of northern and Central Asia, and 
especially Korea, but there are also likenesses to the Malay tongues (p. 12). 


[James Francis Abbott, Ph. D. Japanese Expansion and Japanese Policies. New York, 1916.] 

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SHIELD. 

It is of interest to discover that the Japanese, on their part, have long had very 
clearly denned ideas on this subject and understand the situation and its implications 
better than we do. 

In 1892, when Japan was taking the final steps in the way of concluding the current 
treaties with foreign powers, this matter of the alien danger perhaps to be encountered 
with the abolition of extraterritoriality greatly agitated her statesmen. Mr. (now 
Viscount') Kaneko took occasion to write Herbert Spencer, who was a sort of oracle in 
such things, asking his advice. Spencer answered at length. Among other things 

he said: . 

“The Japanese policy should, I think, be that of keeping Americans and Europeans 
as much as possible at arm’s length.. In the presence of the more powerful races, your 
position is one of chronic danger and you should take every precaution to give as 
little foothold as possible to foreigners. ‘ It seems to me that the only forms of inter¬ 
course which you may with advantage permit are those which are indispensable for 
the exchange of commodities and exchange of ideas. No further privileges should be 
allowed to people of other races, and especially to people of the more powerful races, 
than is absolutely needful for the achievement of these ends. Apparently you are 



22 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


proposing, by revision of the treaty powers with Europe and America, to open the 
whole Empire to foreigners and foreign capital. I regard this as a fatal policy. * * * 

“ In pursuance of the advice thus generally indicated, I should say, in answer to 
your first question, that there should be not only a prohibition to foreign persons to 
hold property in land, but also a refusal to give them leases and a permission only 
to reside as annual tenants. 

“To your remaining question, respecting the intermarriage of foreigners and Japan¬ 
ese, my reply is that, as rationally answered, there is no difficulty at all. * * * It 
is at root a question of biology. * * * If you mix the constitutions of two widely 
divergent varieties which have severally become adapted to widely divergent modes 
of life, you get a constitution which is adapted to the mode of life of neither—a consti¬ 
tution which will not work properly, because it is not fitted for any set of conditions 
whatever. By all means, therefore, peremptorily interdict marriages of Japanese 
with foreigners. 

“I have for the reasons indicated entirely approved of the regulations which have 
been established in America for restraining the Chinese immigration, and had I the 
power would restrict them to the smallest possible amount, my reasons for this decision 
being that one of two things must happen. If the Chinese are allowed to settle ex¬ 
tensively in America, they must either, if they remain unmixed, form a subject class 
in the position, if not of slaves, yet of a class approaching slaves; or if they mix, they 
they must form a bad hybrid. In either case, supposing the immigration to be large, 
immense social mischief must arise and eventually social disorganization. The same 
thing will happen if there should be any considerable mixture of the European or 
American^ races with the Japanese. 

“You see, therefore, that my advice is strongly conservative in all directions, and 
I end by saying, as I began, keep other races at arm’s length as much as possible.” 

Viscount Kaneko has never revealed to what extent Spencer’s advice was followed. 
But Spencer was the great vogue in Japan in the nineties, and it must have had weight. 
The anxietv concerning mixed marriages in Japan seems to have been quite 
unfounded, (p. 182). 


[Ernest Wilson Clement. A Short History of Japan. Chicago, 1915.] 

This brings us to one more difficult subject for consideration in this chapter: Who 
were the ancestors of the Japanese, and were they the aborigines of Japan? The 
latter part of this double question should naturally be answered first. It now appears 
quite certain that the ancestors of the Japanese were not the aborigines of Japan; 
and some make a similar statement concerning the ancestors of the rapidly disappear¬ 
ing Ainu. The real aborigines are said to have been the aforementioned Koro-pok- 
guru, who were driven out by the Ainu into Sakhalin, the Kuriles, Kamschatka, and 
perhaps also to North America. But Doctor Munro is strongly of the opinion that these 
dwarfs never existed and that the Ainu were the aborigines of Japan. 

The other part of the double question must receive a double answer. Even if we 
accept Brinkley’s views of “three tides of more or less civilized immigrants,” who 
settled respectively in Izumo, Yamato, and Kiushiu, it looks as if the two latter may 
represent two movements of the same or closely related peoples. But there are, and 
always have been, two very distinct types of Japanese; and these may be said, in a 
general way, to represent Mongol and Malay. The former, “neither Koreans nor Chi¬ 
nese,” evidently reached Izumo via Korea; the latter naturally drifted up from the 
south on the Japan Current to Kiushiu and to the Kii Promontory, in which is Yamato. 
These two types are still distinguishable physically; the patrician or aristocratic type 
is Mongoloid; while the plebeian type is Malayan. The latter “has a conspicuously 
dark skin, prominent cheek bones, a large mouth, a robust and heavily-boned phy¬ 
sique, a flat nose, full straight eyes, and a receding forehead.” The former “is sym¬ 
metrically and delicately built; his complexion varies from yellow to almost pure 
white; his eyes are narrow, set obliquely to the nose; the eyelids heavy; the eye¬ 
brows lofty; the mouth small; the face oval; the nose aquiline; the hand remarkably 
slender and supple.” 

The band which made the political conquest of Japan and, with Jimmu, founded the 
one dynasty which has always ruled Japan, was probably Malayan. But that conquest 
was quite like the Norman conquest of England, in that the victors became absorbed 
in the vanquished and the union produced a mighty nation (p. 8). 



JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


23 


[Capt. F. Brinkley, R. A. A History of the Japanese People. New York, 1915, Ch. V.] 

ORIGIN OF THE JAPANESE NATION—HISTORICAL EVIDENCES. 

In considering the question of the origin of the Japanese nation, four guides are 
available, namely, written annals, archaeological relics, physical features, and lin¬ 
guistic affinities. 

WRITTEN ANNALS. 

The annals; that is to say, the Records and the Chronicles, speak of six peoples, 
namely, first, Izanagi and his fellow Kami, who, as shown above, may reasonably be 
identified with the original immigrants represented in the story of the so-called “birth ” 
of the islands; secondly, Jimmu and his followers, who reconquered the islands; 
thirdly, the Yemishi, who are identical with the modern Ainu; fourthly, the Kumaso; 
fifthly, the Sushen; and, sixthly, the Tsuchigumo (earth spiders). By naming these 
six separately it is not intended to imply that they are necessarily different races; 
that remains to be decided. It will be convenient to begin with the Sushen. 

THE SUSHEN. 

The Sushen were Tungusic ancestors of the Manchu. They are first mentioned in 
Japanese annals in A.D. 549, when a number of them arrived by boat on the north 
of Sado Island and settled there, living on fish caught during spring and summer and 
salted or dried for winter use. The people of Sado regarded them as deirfons and 
carefully avoided them, a reception which implies total absence of previous inter¬ 
course. Finally they withdrew, and nothing more is heard of their race for over a 
hundred years, when, in A. D. 658, Hirafu, omi of Abe and warden of Koshi (the 
northwestern provinces, Etchu, Echizen, and Echigo), went on an expedition against 
them. 

Nothing is recorded as to the origin or incidents of this campaign. One account says 
that Hirafu, on his return, presented two white bears to the Empress; that he fought 
with the Sushen and carried back 49 captives. It may be assumed, however, that the 
enterprise proved abortive, for two years later (660) he was again sent against the 
Sushen with 200 ships. En route for his destination he took on board his own vessel 
some of the inhabitants of Yezo (Yemishi) to act as guides, and the flotilla arrived 
presently in the vicinity of a long river, unnamed in the annals but supposed to have 
been the Ishikari, which debouches on the west coast of Yezo. There a body of over 
a thousand Yemishi in a camp facing the river sent messengers to report that the 
Sushen fleet had arrived in great force and that they were in imminent danger. The 
Sushen had over 20 vessels and were lying in a concealed port, whence Hirafu, in 
vain sent messengers to summon them. 

What ensued is thus told in the Chronicles: “Hirafu heaped up on the beach colored 
silk stuffs, weapons, iron, etc.,” to excite the cupidity of the Sushen, who thereupon 
drew up their fleet in order, approached “with equal oars, flying flags made of feathers 
tied to poles, and halted in a shallow place. Then from one of their ships they sent 
forth two old men who went around the colored silk stuffs and other articles which 
had been piled up, examined them closely, whereafter they changed the single gar¬ 
ments they had on, and each taking up a piece of cloth went on board their ship and 
departed.” Meanwhile the Japanese had not made any attempt to molest them. 
Presently the two old men returned, took off the exchanged garments and, laying them 
down together with the cloth they had taken away, reembarked and departed. 

Up to this Hirafu seems to have aimed at commercial intercourse. But his overtures 
having been rejected, he sent to summon the Sushen. They refused to come, and 
their prayer for peace having been unsuccessful, they retired to “their own pali¬ 
sades.” There the Japanese attacked them, and the S-ushen, seeing that defeat was 
inevitable, put to death their own wives and children. How they themselves fared 
is not recorded, nor do the Chronicles indicate where “their own palisades” were 
situated, but in Japan it has always been believed that the desperate engagement was 
fought in the .Amur River, and its issue may be inferred from the fact that although 
the Japanese lost one general officer, Hirafu was able on his return to present to the 
Empress more than 50 ‘‘ barbarians, ’ ’ presumably Sushen. Nevertheless, it is recorded 
that in the same year (A. D. 660) 47 men of Sushen were entertained at court, and the 
inference is either that these were among the above “savages in wdiich case Japan’s 
treatment of her captured foes in ancient times would merit applause—or that the 
Sushen had previously established relations with Japan, and that Hirafu’s campaign 
was merely to repel trespass. 

During the next 16 years nothing more is heard of the Sushen, but, in A. D. 676, 
seven of them arrived in the train of an envoy from Sinra, the eastern of the three 


24 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


kingdoms into which Korea was then divided. This incident evokes no remark 
whatever from the compilers of the Chronicles, and they treat with equal indifference 
the statement that during the reign of the Fmpress Jito, in the year A. D. 696, presents 
of coats and trousers made of brocade, together with dark-red and deeprpurple coarse 
silks, oxen, and other things were given to two men of Sushen. Nothing in this brief 
record suggests that any considerable intercourse existed in ancient times between the 
Japanese and the Tungusic Manchu, or that the latter settled in Jaj)an in any appre¬ 
ciable numbers. 


THE YEMISHT. 

The Yemishi are identified with the modern Ainu. It appears that the continental 
immigrants into Japan applied to the semisavage races encountered by them the 
epithet “Yebisu” or ‘‘Yemishi,’’ terms which may have been interchangeable 
onomatopes for “barbarian.” The Yemishi are a moribund race. Only a remnant, 
numbering a few thousands, survives, now in the northern island of Yezo. Neverthe¬ 
less, it has been proved by Chamberlain’s investigations into the origin of place names, 
that in early times the Yemishi extended from the north dow r n the eastern section of 
Japan as far as the region where the present capital (Tokyo) stands, and on the west to 
the Province now called Echizen; and that, when the Nihongi was written, they still 
occupied s large part of the main island. 

We find the first mention of them in a poem attributed to the Emperor Jimmu. Con¬ 
ducting his campaign for the reconquest of Japan, Jimmu, uncertain of the disposition 
of a bay d of inhabitants, ordered his general, Michi, to construct a spacious hut (muro) 
and Civite the 80 doubtful characters to a banquet. An equal number of Jimmu’s 
sol uers acted as hosts, and, at a given signal, when the guests were all drunk, they 
were slaughtered. Jimmu composed a couplet expressing his troops' delight at having 
disposed of a formidable foe so easily, and in this verselet he spoke of one Yemishi 
being reputed to be a match for 100 men. 

Whether this couplet really belongs to its context, however, is questionable; the 
80 warriors killed in the muro may not have been Yemishi at all. But the verse does 
certainly tend to show that the Yemishi had a high fighting reputation in ancient 
times, though it will presently be seen that such fame scarcely consists with the 
facts revealed by history. It is true that when next we hear of the Yemishi more 
than seven and a half centuries have passed and during that long interval they may 
have been engaged in a fierce struggle for the right of existence. There is no evidence, 
however, that such was the case. 

On the contrary, it would seem that the Japanese invaders encountered no great 
resistance from the Yemishi in the south, and were for a long time content to leave 
them unmolested in the northern and eastern regions. In A. D. 95, however, 
Takenouchi-no-Sukune was commissioned by the Emperor Keiko to explore those 
regions. He devoted two years to the task, and on his return in 97 he submitted to 
his sovereign this request: “In the eastern wilds there is a country called Hi-taka-mi 
(Sun-height). The people of this country, both men and women, tie up their hair 
in the form of a mallet and tattoo their bodies. They are of fierce temper and their 
general name is Yemishi. Moreover, the land is wide and fertile. We should attack 
it and take it.” (Anston’s translation.) It is observable that the principal motive 
of this advice is aggressive. The Yemishi had not molested the Japanese or shown 
any turbulence. They ought to be attacked because their conquest would be 
profitable; that was sufficient. 

Takenouchi’s counsels could not be immediately followed. Other business of a 
cognate nature in the south occupied the court’s attention, and 13 years elapsed before 
(A. B. 110) the celebrated hero, Prince Yamato-dake, led an expedition against the 
Yemishi of the East. In commanding him to undertake this task, the Emperor, 
according to the Chronicles v made a speech which, owing to its Chinese tone, has 
been called apocryphal, though some, at any rate, of the statements it embodies are 
attested by modern observation of Aniu manners and customs. He spoke of the 
Yemishi as being the most powerful among the “eastern savages”; said that their 
“men and women lived together promiscuously”; that there was no “distinction of 
father and child”; that in winter “they dwelt in holes and in summer they lived in 
huts”; that their clothing consisted of furs and that they drank blood; that when 
they received a favor they forgot it, but if an injury was done them they never failed 
to avenge it, and that they kept arrows in their top-knots and carried swords within 
their clothing. How correct these attributes may have been at the time they were 
uttered there are no means of judging, but the customs of the modern Ainu go far to 
attest the accuracy of the Emperor Keiko’s remarks about their ancestors. 

Yamato-dake prefaced his campaign by worshipping at the shrine of Ise, where he 
received the sword “herb-queller,” which Susanoo had taken from the last chieftain 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


25 


of the Izumo tribesmen. Thence he sailed along the coast to Sumga, where he landed, 
and was nearly destroyed by the burning of a moor into which he had been persuaded 
to penetrate in search of game. Escaping with difficulty, and having taken a terrible 
vengeance upon the “brigands ” who had sought to compass his destruction, he pushed 
on into Sagami, crossed the bay to Kazusa, and, sailing north, reached the southern 
shore of Shimosa, which was the frontier of the Yemishi. The vessels of the latter 
assembled with the intention of offering resistance, but at the aspect of the Japanese 
fleet and the incomparably superior arms and arrows of the men it carried, they sub¬ 
mitted unconditionally and became personal attendants on Yamato-dake. 

Three things are noticeable in this narrative. The frst is that the “brigands of 
Suruga” were not Yemishi; second, that the Yemishi offered no resistante; and the 
third that the Yemishi chiefs are called in the Chronicles “Kami of the islands” 
and “Kami of the country”—titles which indicate that they were held in some 
respect by the Japanese. It is not explicitly recorded that Yamato-dake had any 
further encounter with the Yemishi, but figurative references show that he had much 
fighting. The Chronicles quote him as saying, after his return to Kii from an ex¬ 
tended march through the northeastern Provinces and after penetrating as far as 
Hi-taka-mi (modern Hitachi), the headquarters of the Yemishi, that the only Yemishi 
who remained unsubmissive were those of Shinano and Koshi (Echigo, E*tchu, and 
Echizen). But although Yamato-dake subsequently entered Shinano, where he 
suffered much from the arduous nature of the ground, and though he sent a general 
to explore Kcshi, he ultimately retired to Owari, where he died from the effects of 
fatigue and exposure according to some authorities, of a wound from a poisoned arrow 
according to others. 

His last act was to present as slaves to the shrine of Ise the Yemishi who had 
originally surrendered and who had subsequently attached themselves to his person. 
They proved so noisy, however, that the priestess of the shrine sent them to the 
Yamato Court, which assigned for them a settlement on Mount Mimoro. Here, too, 
their conduct was so turbulent that they received orders to divide and take up their 
abode at any place throughout the five Provinces of Harima, Sanuki, Ivo, Aki, and 
Awa, where, in after ages, they constituted a hereditary corporation of Saeki (Saekibe). 

These details deserve to be recorded, for their sequel shows historically that there 
is an Yemishi element in the Japanese race. Thus, in later times we find the high 
rank of muraji borne bv a member of the Saekibe. Fifteen years (A. D. 125) after 
the death of Yamato-dake, Prince Sajima was appointed governor general of the 
15 Provinces of Tosan-do (the eastern mountain circuit); that is to say, the Provinces 
along the east coast. He died en route and his son, Prince Mimoro, succeeded to 
the office. During his tenure of power the Yemishi raised a disturbance, but no 
sooner was force employed against them than they made obeisance and threw them¬ 
selves on the mercy of the Japanese, who pardoned all that submitted. 

This orderly condition remained uninterrupted until A. D. 367,. when the Yemishi 
in Kazusa made one of the very few successful revolts on record. They killed 
Tamiehi, a Japanese general sent against them, and they drove back his forces, who 
do not appear to have taken very effective measures of retaliation. In 482 we find 
the Yemishi rendering homage to the Emperor Kenso, a ceremony which was re¬ 
peated on the accession of the Emperor Kimmei (540). 

But, though meek in the presence of peril, the Yemiski appear to have been of a 
brawling temperament. Thus, in 561, several thousand of them showed hostility 
on the frontier, yet no sooner were their chiefs threatened with death than they 
submitted. At that time all the Provinces in the northeast and northwest—then 
included in Mutsu and Dewa—were in Yemishi possession. They rebelled again 
in 637, and at first gained a signal success, driving the Japanese general, Katana, into 
a fortress where he was deserted by his troops. His wife saved the situation. She 
upbraided her husband as he was scaling the palisades to escape by night, fortified 
him with wine, girded his sword on herself, and caused her female attendants—of 
whom there were “several tens”—to twang bowstrings. Katana, taking heart of 
grace, advanced single handed; the Yemishi, thinking that his troops had rallied 
gave way, and the Japanese soldiers, returning to their duty, killed or captured all 
the insurgents. 

No other instance of equally determined resistance is recorded on the part of ^ie 
Yemishi. In 642, several thousand made submission in Koshi. Four years later 
(646), we find Yemishi doing homage to the Emperor Kotoku. Yet in 645 it was 
deemed necessary to establish a barrier settlement against them in Echigo; and where¬ 
as, in 655, when the Empress Saimei ascended the throne, her Court at Naniwa enter¬ 
tained 99 of the northern Yemishi and 45 of the eastern, conferring cups of honor 
on 15, while at the same time another numerous body came to render homage and 
offer gifts, barely three years had elapsed when, in 655, a Japanese squadron of 180 



26 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


vessels, under the command of Hirafu, omi of Abe, was engaged attacking the Yemishi 
at Akita on the northwest coast of the main island. 

All this plainly shows that many districts were still peopled by Yemishi and that 
their docility varied in different localities. In the Akita campaign the usual sur¬ 
render was rehearsed. The Yemishi declared that their bows and arrows were for 
hunting, not for fighting, and the affair ended in a great feast given by Hirafu, the 
sequel being that 200 Yemishi proceeded to court, carrying presents, and were ap¬ 
pointed to various offices in the localities represented, receiving also gifts of arms, 
armour, drums, and flags. 

An interesting episode is recorded of this visit. One of the Yemishi, having been 
appointed to a high post, was instructed to investigate the Yemishi population and 
the captive population. Who were these captives? They seem to have been 
Sushen, for at the feast given by Hirafu his Yemishi guests came accompanied by 
35 captives, and it is incredible that Japanese prisoners would have been thus humili¬ 
ated in the sight of their armed countrymen. There will be occasion to recur to this 
point presently. Here we have to note that in spite of frequent contact, friendly 
or hostile, and in spite of so many years of intercourse, the Yemishi seem to have 
been still regarded by the Japane.se as objects of curiosity. For, in the year 654, 
envoys from Yamato to the Tang Emperor of China took with them a Yemishi man 
and woman to show to his Majesty. 

The Chinese sovereign was much struck by the unwonted appearance of these 
people. He asked several questions, which are recorded verbatim in the Chronicles; 
aed the envoys informed him that there were three tribes of Yemishi: namely, the 
Tsugaru Yemishi, who were the most distant: next, the Ara Yemishi (rough or only 
partially subdued), and lastly, the Nigi Yemishi (quiet or docile'): that they sustained 
life by eating not cereals, but flesh, and that they dispensed with houses, preferring 
to live under trees and in the recesses of mountains. The Chinese Emporer finally 
remarked, “When we look at the unusual bodily appearance of these Yemishi, it is 
strange in the extreme. ” 

Evidently whatever the original provenance of the Yemishi. they had never been 
among the numerous peoples who observed the custom of paying visits of ceremony 
to the Chinese capital. They were apparently not included in the family of Far 
Eastern nations. From the second half of the seventh century they are constantly 
found carrying tribute to the Japanese Court and receiving presents or being enter¬ 
tained in return. But these evidences of docility and friendship were not indicative 
of the universal mood. The Yemishi located in the northeastern section of the main 
island continued to give trouble up to the beginning of the ninth century and through¬ 
out this region as well as along the west coast from the thirty-eighth parallel of latitude 
northward the Japanese were obliged to build six castles and ten barrier posts between 
A. D. 647 and 800. 

These facts, however, have no concern with the immediate purpose of this his¬ 
torical reference further than to show that from the earliest times the Yamato immi¬ 
grants found no opponents in the northern half of the island except the Yemishi and 
the Sushen. One more episode, however, is germane. In the time (682) of the 
Emperor Temmu, the Yemishi of Koshi, who had by that time become quite docile, 
asked for and received 7,000 families of captives to found a district. A Japanese 
writing alleges that these captives were subjects of the Crown who had been seized 
and enslaved by the savages. But that is inconsistent with all probabilities. The 
Yamato might sentence these people to serfdom among men of their own race, but 
they never would have condemned Japanese to such a position among the Yemishi. 
Evidently these “captives” were prisoners taken by the Yamato from the Koreans, 
the Sushen, or some other hostile nation. 

THE KUMASO. 

There has been some dispute about the appellation “ Kumaso. ’ ’ One high authority 
thinks that Kuma and So were the names of two tribes inhabiting the extreme south 
of Japan; that is to say, the Provinces now called Hyuga, Osumi, and Satsuma. 
Others regard the term as denoting one tribe only. The question is not very material. 
Agiong all the theories formed about the Kumaso, the most plausible is that they be¬ 
longed to the Sow race of Borneo and that they found their way to Japan on the breast 
of the “black tide.” 

Many similarities of custom have been traced between the two peoples. Both 
resorted freely to ornamental tattooing; both used shields decorated with hair; both 
were skilled in making articles of bamboo, especially hats; both were fond of dancing 
with accompaniment of singing and handclapping; and both dressed their hair alike. 
Japanese annals use the word “Kumaso” for the first time in connection with the 
annexation of Tsukushi (Kyushu) by the Izanagi expedition, when one of the four 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


27 


faces of the island is called the “land of Kumaso.” Plainly if this nomenclature 
may be taken as evidence, the Kumaso must have arrived in Japan at a date prior 
to the advent of the immigrants represented by Izanagi and Izanami; and it would 
further follow that they did not penetrate far into the interior, but remained in the 
vicinity of the place of landing, which may be supposed to have been some point 
on the southern coast of Kyushu. Nor does there appear to have been any collision 
between the two tides of immigrants, for the first appearance of the Kumaso in a 
truculent role was in A. D. 81, when they are said to have rebelled. 

The incident, though remote from the capital, was sufficiently formidable to induce 
the Emperor Keiko to lead a force against them in person from Yamato. En route 
he had to deal with “brigands” infesting Suwo and Buzen, Provinces separated by 
the Inland Sea and situated respectively on the south of the main island and the 
north of Kyushu. These Provinces were ruled by chieftainesses, who declared them¬ 
selves loyal to the imperial cause, and gave information about the haunts and habits 
of the “brigands,” who in Suwo had no special appellation but in Buzen were known 
as Tsuchigumo, a name to be spoken of presently. They were disposed of partly 
by stratagem and partly by open warfare. But when the Yamato troops arrived in 
Hyuga within striking distance of the Kumaso, the emperor hesitated. He deemed 
it wise not to touch the spear points of these puissant foes. 

Ultimately he overcame them by enticing the two daughters of the principal leaders 
and making a show of affection for one of them. She conducted the Japanese soldiers 
to her father’s residence, and having plied him with strong drink, cut his bowstring 
while he slept so that the soldiers could kill him with impunity. It is recorded that 
Keiko put the girl to death for her unfilial conduct, but the assassination of her father 
helped the Japanese materially in their campaign against the Kumaso. whom they 
succeeded in subduing and in whose land the Emperor remained six years. 

The Kumaso were not quelled, however. Scarcely eight years had elapsed from 
the time of Keiko’s return to Yamato when they rebelled again, “making ceaseless 
raids upon the frontier districts;” and he sent against them his son, Yamato-dake; 
with a band of skilled archers. This youth, one of the most heroic figures in ancient 
Japanese history, was only 16. He disguised himself as a girl and thus gained access 
to a banquet given by the principal Kumaso leader to celebrate the opening of a new 
residence. Attracted by the beauty of the supposed gild, the Kumaso chieftain 
placed her beside him, and when he had drunk heavily, Yamato-dake stabbed him 
to the heart, subsequently serving all his band in the same way. After this, the 
Kumaso remained quiet for nearly a century, but in the year 193, during the reign 
of the Emperor Chuai. they once more rebelled, and the Emperor organized an expe¬ 
dition against them. He failed in the struggle and was killed by the Kumaso’s arrows. 
Thenceforth history is silent about them. 

’Who, then, were they? It is related in the Chronicles that, after breaking the 
power of the Kumaso, the Emperor Keiko made a tour of inspection in Tsukushi 
(Kyushu), and arriving at the district of Kuma, summoned two brothers, princes of 
Kuma, to pay homage. One obeyed, buf the other refused, and soldiers were 
therefore sent to put him to death. Now, Kuma was the name of the three kingdoms 
into which the Korean peninsula was divided in ancient times, and it has been sug¬ 
gested (Aston) that the land of Kuma in Korea was the parent country of Kuma in 
Japan, Kom in the Korean language having the same meaning (bear) as Kuma in the 
Japanese. This, of course, involves the conclusion that the Kumaso were originally 
Korean emigrants, a theory somewhat difficult to reconcile with their location in the 
extreme south of Kyushu. 

The apparent silence of the annals about the subsequent career of the tribe is 
accounted for by supposing that the Kumaso were identical with the Hayato (falcon 
men), who make their first appearance upon the scene in prehistoric days as followers 
of Hosuseri in his contest with his younger brother, Hohodemi, the hero of the legend 
about the palace of the sea god. Hohodemi—according to the rationalized version 
of the legend—having obtained assistance in the shape of ships and mariners from an 
oversea monarch (supposed to have reigned in Korea), returned to Tsukushi to fight 
his brother, and, being victorious, spared Hosuseri’s life on condition that the de¬ 
scendants of the vanquished through 80 generations should serve the victor’s descend¬ 
ants as mimes. 

“ On that account,” says the Chronicles, “ the various Hayato, descended from Hosu¬ 
seri to the present time, do not leave the vicinity of the imperial palace inclosure and 
render service instead of watchdogs.” The first mention of the name Hayato after the 
prehistoric battle in Kyushu, occurs in the year 399, when Sashihire, one of the tribe, 
was induced to assassinate hie master, an imperial prince. This incident goes to show 
that individual members of the tribe were then employed at court; an inference con¬ 
firmed 51 years later, when, on the death of Emperor Yuryaku, “ the Hayato lamented 


28 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


night and day beside the misasagi (tomb) and refused the food offered to them, until 
at the end of seven days they died.” 

It can scarcely be doubted that we have here a reversion to the old custom which 
compelled slaves to follow their lords to the grave. The Hayato serving in the court at 
that epoch held the status generally assigned in ancient days to vanquished people, 
the status of serfs or slaves. Six times during the next 214 years we find the Hayato 
repairing to the court to pay homage, in the performance of which function they are 
usually bracketed with the Yemishi. Once (682) a wrestling match took place in the 
Imperial presence between the Hayato of Osumi and those of Satsuma, and once 
(694) the viceroy of Tsukushi (Kyushu) presented 174 Hayato to the court. 

THE TSUCHI-GUMO. 

In ancient Japan there was a' class of men to whom the epithet “ Tsuchi-gumo ” 
(earth spiders) was applied. Their identity has been a subject of much controversy. 
The first mention made of them in Japanese annals occurs in connection with the 
slaughter of 80 braves invited to a banquet by the Emperor Jimmu’s general in a pit¬ 
dwelling at Osaka. The Records apply to these men the epithet, “Tsuchi-gumo,” 
whereas the Chronicles represent the Emperor as celebrating the incident in a couplet 
which speaks of them as Yemishi. It will be seen presently that the apparent confu¬ 
sion of epithet probably conveys a truth. 

The next allusion to Tsuchi-gumo occurs in the annals of the year (662 B. C.) fol¬ 
lowing the above event, according to the chronology of the Chronicles. The Em¬ 
peror having commanded his generals to exercise the troops, Tsuchi-gumo were found 
in three places, and as they declined to submit, a detachment was sent against them. 
Concerning a fourth band of these defiant folk the Chronicles say: “They had short 
bodies and long legs and arms. They were of the same class as the pigmies. The 
Imperial troops wove nets of dolichos, which they flung over them and then slew 
them.” 

There are four comments to be made on this. The first is that the scene of the 
fighting was in Yamato. The second, that the chiefs of the Tsuchi-gumo had Jap¬ 
anese names—names identical, in two cases, with those of a kind of Shinto priest 
(hafuri) and therefore most unlikely to have been borne by men not of Japanese 
origin. The third, that the presence of Tsuchi-gumo in Yamato preceded the arrival 
of Jimmu’s expedition. And the fourth, that the Records are silent about the whole 
episode. As for the things told in the Chronicles about short bodies, long limbs, 
pigmies, and nets of dolichos, they may be dismissed as mere fancies suggested by 
the name Tsuchi-gumo. which was commonly supposed to mean “earth spiders.” If 
any inference may be drawn from the Chronicles’ story, it is that there were Japanese 
in Yamato before Jimmu’s time and that Tsuchi-gumo were simply bands of Japanese 
raiders. 

They are heard of next in the Province of Bungo (on the northeast of Kyushu) 
where (A. D. 82) the Emperor Keiki led an army to attack the Kumaso. Two bands of 
Tsuchi-gumo are mentioned as living there, and the imperial forces had no little 
difficulty in-subduing them. Their chiefs are described as “mighty of frame and 
having numerous followers.” In dealing with the first band, Keiko caused his 
bravest soldiers to carry mallets made from camellia trees, though why such weapons 
should have been preferred to the trenchant swords used by the Japanese there is 
nothing to show. (Another account says “mallet-headed swords,” which is much 
more credible.) In dealing with the second, he was driven back once by their rain 
of arrows, and when he attacked from another quarter the Tsuchi-gumo, their sub¬ 
mission having been refused, flung themselves into a ravine and perished. 

Here again, certain points have to be noticed: That there were Tsuchi-gumo in 
Kyushu as well as in Yamato; that if one account describes them as pigmies, another 
depicts them as “mighty of frame,” and that in Kyushu, as in Yamato, the Tsuchi- 
gumo had Japanese names. Only once' again do the annals refer to Tsuchi-gumo. 
They relate curtly that on his return from quelling the Kumaso the Emperor Keiko 
killed a Tsuchi-gumo in the Province of Hizen. The truth seems to be that factitious 
import has been attached to the Tsuchi-gumo. Mainly because they were pit dwellers, 
it was assumed for a time that they represented a race which had immigrated to 
Japan at some date prior to the arrival of the Yemishi (modern Ainu). 

This theory was founded on the supposed discovery of relics of pit dwellers in the 
islands of Yezo and Itorop, and their hasty identification as Kuro-pok-guru—-the Ainu 
term for underground dwellers—whose modern representatives are seen among the 
Kurilsky or their neighbors in Kamchatka and Saghalien. But closer examination of 
the Yezo and Itorop pits showed that there was complete absence of any mark of 
antiquity—such as the presence of large trees or even deep-rooted brushwood—that 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


29 


they were arranged in regular order, suggesting a military encampment rather than the 
abode of savages; that they were of uniform size, with few exceptions; that on exca¬ 
vation they yielded fragments of hard wood, unglazed pottery, and a Japanese dirk, 
and, finally, that their site corresponded with that of military encampments estab¬ 
lished in Yezo and the Kuriles by the Japanese Government in the early part of the 
nineteenth century as a defense against Russian aggression. 

Evidently the men who constructed and used these pit dwellings were not pre¬ 
historic savages but modern Japanese soldiers. Further very conclusive testimony 
has been collected by the Rev. John Batchelor, who has devoted profound study to 
the Ainu. He found that the inhabitants of Shikotan, who had long been supposed 
to be a remnant of pre-Ainu immigrants, were brought thither from an island called 
Shimushir in the Kurile group in 1885 by order of the Japanese Government; that they 
declared themselves to be descended from men of Saghalien; that they spoke nothing 
but the Ainu language, and that they inhabited pits in winter, as do also the Ainu 
now living in Saghalien. If any further proof were needed, it might be drawn from the 
fact that no excavation has brought to light any relics whatever of a race preceding 
and distinct from the Yemishi (Ainu), all the pits and graves hitherto searched having 
yielded Yamato or Yemishi skulls. Neither has there been found any trace of pigmies. 

An Ainu myth is responsible for the belief in the existence of such beings: “In very 
ancient times, a race of people who dwelt in pits lived among us. They were so very 
tiny that 10 of them could easily take shelter beneath one burdock leaf. When they 
went to catch herrings they used to make boats by sewing the leaves together, and 
always fished with a hook. If a single herring was caught, it took all the strength of 
the men of 5 boats, or 10 sometimes, to hold it and drag it ashore, while whole crowds 
were required to kill it with their clubs and spears. Yet, strange to say, these divine 
little men used even to kill great whales. Surely these pit dwellers were gods. ” 

Evidently, if such legends are to be credited, the existence of fairies must no longer 
be denied in Europe. Side by side with the total absence of all tangible relics may 
be set the fact that, whereas numerous place-names in the main island of Japan have 
been identified as Ainu words, none has been traced to any alien tongue such as might 
be associated with earlier inhabitants. Thus, the theory of a special race of immigrants 
anterior to the Yemishi has to be abandoned so far as the evidence of pit dwelling is 
concerned. The fact is that the use of partially underground residences can not be 
regarded as specially characteristic of any race or as differentiating one section of the 
people of Japan from another. To this day the poorer classes in Korea depend for 
shelter upon pits covered with thatch or strong oil-paper. They call these dwellings 
um or um-mak, a term corresponding to the Japanese muro. “Pit dwellers are men¬ 
tioned in old Chinese literature, and the references to the muro in the records and 
chronicles show that the muro of those days had a character similar to that of the 
modern Korean um-mak” (Aston). We read of a muro being dug; of steps down to it; 
and we read of a muro big enough to hold 160 persons at one time. 

The muro was not always simply a hole roofed over; it sometimes contained a 
house having a wooden frame lashed together with vine tendrils, the walls lined 
with sedges and reeds and plastered with a mixture of grass and clay. The roof was 
thatched with reeds; there was a door opening inwards, and a raised platform served 
for sleeping purposes. A dwelling closely resembling this description was actually 
unearthed near Akita in O-U, in 1807. Muro were used in ancient times by the 
highest as well as the poorest classes. Susanoo is said by the Izumo Fudoki to have 
made for himself a muro: Jimmu’s son is represented as sleeping in a great muro, 
and the Emperor Keiko, when (A. D. 82) prosecuting his campaign in Kyushu, is 
said to have constructed a muro for a temporary palace. “ In fact, pit dwelling in 
northern climates affords no indication of race.” 

CONCLUSION FROM HISTORICAL EVIDENCE. 

Thus the conclusion suggested by historical evidence is that the Japanese nation 
is composed of four elements: The Yamato, the Yemishi (modern Ainu), the Kumaso 
(or Hayato), and the Sushen. As to the last of these, there is no conclusive indica¬ 
tion that they ever immigrated in appreciable numbers. It does not follow, of 
course, that the historical evidence is exhaustive, especially Japanese historical 
evidence; for the annalists of Japan do not appear to have paid any special attention 
to racial questions (p. 34, et. «eq.). 


3887—22-3 



30 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


[William Elliot Griffis, D. D., L. H. D. The Mikado’s Empire. New York, 1913.] 

THE ABORIGINES. 

In seeking the origin of the Japanese people, we must take into consideration the 
geographical position of their island chain, with reference to its proximity to the 
mainland, and its situation in the ocean currents. Japanese traditions and history 
may have much to tell us concerning the present people of Japan—whether they are 
exclusively an indigenous race, or the composite of several ethnic stocks. From a 
study, however imperfect, of the language, physiognomy, and bodily characteristics, 
survivals of ancient culture, historic geology, and the relics of man’s struggle with 
nature in the early ages, and of the actual varieties of mankind now included within 
the Mikado’s dominions, we may learn much of the ancestors of the present Japanese 

(p. 26). 

******* 

LIFE IN ANCIENT JAPAN. 

The comparatively profound peace from the era of Sujin Tenno to the introduction 
of Chinese civilization was occasionally interrupted by insurrections in the southern 
and western parts of the Empire, or by the incursions of the unsubdued aborigines 
in the north and east. 

During these centuries there continued that welding of races—the Ainu, Malay, 
Nigrito, Corean, and Yamato—into one ethnic composite—the Japanese—and the 
development of the national temperament, molded by nature, circumstances, and 
original bent, which have produced the unique Japanese character (p. 86). 


[Okakura Yoshisabu.ro. The Life and Thought of Japan. New York, 1913.] 

You will come, at least to some extent, to acknowledge the truth of the statement 
so often made in books on Japan, that there are two distinct racial face-types among 
the present Japanese * * * Be it remembered that both these types are Mongol. 
Both have the yellowish skin, the straight hair, the scanty beard, the broadish skull, 
the more or less oblique eyes, and the somewhat high cheek bones, which characterize 
all well established branches of the Mongol race (p. 41). 

And as to those swarms of immigration from China and Korea who crossed the 
sea at various periods in the early days of Japanese history, it did not take many 
generations before they came to adopt the views of the people with whom it was 
their interest in every way to get mixed, and thus they lost their own identity. In 
this manner, notwithstanding an extensive admixture of foreign elements to our 
original stock, we find ourselves as closely unified a nation as if we had been per¬ 
fectly homogeneous from the very beginning. One and the same blood is felt to 
run through our veins, characterized by one and the same set of religious and moral 
ideas. This may perhaps be due to the fact that the three elements—the conquering, 
the conquered, and the immigrating—belonged originally to the same Mongolian 
race, with very little trace of any mingling of Ainu and Malayan blood (p. 48). 

The relation here displayed between the living and the departed may be consid¬ 
ered as a characteristic of the Mongolian race, to which both the Japanese and the 
Chinese belong (p. 54). 


[Ernest W. Clement. A Handbook of Modern Jaan. Chicago, 1913.] 

It is well known that the Japanese are classed under the Mongolian (or yellow) race. 
They themselves boastfully assert that they belong to the “golden race,” and are 
superior to Caucasians, who belong to the “silver race”! As Mongolians they are 
marked not only by a yellowish hue, of many shades, from the darkest to the lightest, 
but also by straight, black hair (rather coarse), scanty beard, rather broad and promi¬ 
nent cheek bones, and eyes more or less oblique. " Some think that the Japanese 
people show strong evidences of Malay origin and claim that the present Emperor, 
for instance, is of a striking Malay type. It is not impossible, nor even improbable, 
that Malays were borne on the “Japan current” northward from their tropical abodes 
to the Japanese islands; but there is no historical record of such a movement. There¬ 
fore the best authorities, like Rein and Baelz, do not acknowledge more than slight 
traces of Malay influence. A more recent theory concerning the origin of the real 
Japanese—or Yamato men, as they called themselves—is that they are descendants of 
the Hittites, whose capital was Hamath, or Yamath, or Yamato! 




JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


31 


There are two distinct types of Japanese—the oval-faced, narrow-eyed, small 
aristocratic class, and the pudding-faced, full-eyed, flat-nosed, stout common people. 
Of these, the latter is the one claimed to be Malay (p. 45). 


[Count Shigonobu Okuma. Fifty Years of New Japan. London, 1909.] 

Thus, whilst Japan’s distance from the mainland precluded continental invasion, 
it did not prevent her, thanks to ocean currents and winds, absorbing other races. 
Hence, various tribes of southern China, the Malayan Archipelago, and India seem, 
from prehistoric times, to have passed northward from island to island, eventually 
reaching Japan and becoming a part of her primitive people, whilst from the north¬ 
west also tribes of northern Korea, Tartary (now Manchuria), Mongolia, and northern 
China sent emigrants to Japan. Generally speaking, the southern immigrants, though 
they comprised Malayan tribes, were active and courageous. They organized them¬ 
selves into communities familiar with the arts of settled life and were, in a word, 
the superior and more highly developed section of the people. The northern invaders, 
puissant as were their continental tribes, seem to have been rather warriors than 
settlers, and in the inhospitable surroundings of the barren north were content to 
leave the country largely uncultivated. Thus, it has come to pass that perhaps no 
other nation on the earth’s surface has incorporated a greater variety of racial types 
than the Japanese. That these numerous peoples, thus combined, produced the 
nation of Japan is in a large measure owing to her geographical situation (p. 11). 
******* 

Immigrants into Japan finding themselves in a settled family life naturally lost 
any evil traits that they might previously have possessed and regained their pristine 
goodness, even approaching the purity of the ‘\six roots.” They saw little need to 
quarrel or to prohibit intermarriage among the races, and thus aborigines and immi¬ 
grants freely and happily intermingled and conversed over the hearth in a tongue 
that quickly became common among them. With the dividing walls thus insensibly 
removed, it is little wonder that the Japanese nation drew into its veins the blood of 
numerous tribes or that during long centuries of such assimilation the clarifying 
process irresistibly went on. Impurities were expelled and the purest characteristics 
of the component elements have been handed on. Of these characteristics, a prime 
one is bravery—a quality shared by both sexes, and which has never been impaired 
by long eras of profound peace, but when occasion offered has bloomed in bright 
achievement. This quality may, in part, have been bequeathed from Mongolian 
forefathers whose fortitude was exemplified in a later era by Genghis Khan, and 
whose innate cruelty and callous wickedness have been weeded out in Japan, while 
their chivalrous courage and patriotic valor have been greatly developed. So, too, 
the Malayan element has been divested of its treacherous ferocity and has survived 
only in its adventurous spirit. 

In language also! as a result of the assimilation of the respective racial elements, 
words of Korean, Manchurian, and Ainu origin are found in Japanese in large num¬ 
bers, but they have been naturalized into the beautiful sound-system of the nation, 
and have helped to make a wealthy vocabulary (p. 15). 


[Sidney L. Gulick, M. A., D. D. Evolution of the Japanese. New York, 1905.] 

How many of the stories of the Kojiki (written in 712 A. D.) and Nihongi (720 A. D.) 
are to be accepted is still a matter of dispute among scholars. Certain it is, however, 
that Japanese early history is veiled in a mythology which seems to center about three 
prominent points: Kyushu, in the south; Yamato, in the east central; and Izumo, in 
the west central region. This mythological history narrates the circumstances of the 
victory of the southern descendants of the gods over the two central regions. _ And it 
has been conjectured that these three centers represent three waves of migration that 
brought the ancestors of the present inhabitants of Japan to these shores. The sup¬ 
position is that they came quite independently and began their conflicts only after 
long periods of residence and multiplication. 

Though this early record is largely mythological, tradition shows us the progenitors 
of the modern Japanese people as conquerors from the west and south who drove the 
aborigines before them and gradually took possession of the entire land. That these 
conquerors were not all of the same stock is proved by the physical appearance of the 
Japanese to-day, and by their language. Through these the student traces an early 




32 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


mixture of races—the Malay, the Mongolian, and the Ural-Altaic. Whether the early 
crossing of these races bears vital relation to the plasticity of the Japanese is a question 
which tempts the scholar. 

Primitive, intertribal conflicts of which we have no reliable records resulted in 
increasing intercourse. Victory was followed by federation. And through the devel¬ 
opment of a common language, of common customs and common ideas, the tribes were 
unified socially and psychically. Consciousness of this unity was emphasized by the 
age-long struggle against the Ainu, who were not completely conquered until the 
eighteenth century. 

With the dawn of authentic history (500-600 A. D.) we find amalgamation of the 
conquering tribes, with, however, constantly recurring interclan and interfamily 
wars. Many of these continued for scores and even hundreds of years, proving that, 
in the modern sense of the word, the Japanese were not yet a nation, though, through 
intermarriage, through the adoption of important elements of civilization brought 
from China and India via Korea, through the nominal acceptance of the Emperor as 
the divinely appointed ruler of the land, they were, in race and in civilization, a fairly 
homogeneous people (p. 35). 


[Capt. F. Brinkley. Japan, Described and Illustrated by the Japanese, Boston and Tokyo, 1904.] 

Nothing is more probable than that Malayan adventurers found their way from island 
to island until they reached Japan, and that they had already peopled its southern 
parts, driving out any Ainu found there, when the so-called Takama-no-hara invaders 
appeared upon the scene. The Malayan type and the Japanese plebeian type are 
sufficiently similar to confirm that hypothesis. It remains, then, to discover the origin 
of the Takama-no-hara immigrants. 

Japanese history commences with the Emperor Jimmu. who in 663 B. C. is said to 
have set out from a place called Mimizu, on the east coast of Kyushu, and, after an 
immensely protracted voyage, to have reached the Bay of Osaka. Landing there, he 
subdued the neighboring districts, and established himself in Yamato province. 
Independently of the fact that Japanese annals did not begin to be written until more 
than a thousand years after the alleged date of Jimmu’s adventures, there are internal 
evidences that impair the credibility of this early history. But the main facts, namely, 
that an invader arrived over sea, that he established the Japanese dynasty, and that 
he was accompanied by the forefathers of the thenceforth dominant race may be 
accepted as true. Western ethnologists are tolerably agreed that Jimmu and his fol¬ 
lowers were Mongolians. 

There have been attempts to identify them with the lost tribes of Israel, with the 
Aztecs, and with other peoples of the Occident. In Japan there is a belief that they 
were Manchurian's; that is to say, a race which originally emigrated from a remote part 
of India, a race distinct from the Chinese, of which some settled in Manchuria, spread 
thence to the northeast of China, and finally passed to Japan. It must be agreed, 
for the moment, to leave the problem partially unsolved; noting, h’owever, that though 
the Japanese shizoku can not be absolutely identified with the Mongolian race of 
to-day, the differences are not so great as to be incapable of reference to the modify¬ 
ing influences of environment acting throughout long centuries. At all events, we 
may conclude that the final immigrants, Jimmu and his followers, of the so-called 
Takama-no-hara folk, found, on their arrival, a Malayan people inhabiting the south¬ 
ern and central parts of Japan, and an Arctic tribe, the Ainu, living in the north, 
and that while they amalgamated with the former after conquest, they drove out the 
latter, treating them as a wholly inferior race, the result being that whereas the Japan¬ 
ese proper show plainly enough the blending of the Mongolian and Malayan types, 
they show no affinity whatever with the Ainu (p. 75). 


[From the Smithsonian report for 1903, pp. 793-804.] 

Primeval Japanese. 1 
[By Capt. F. Brinkley.] 

There are three written records of Japan’s early history. The oldest 2 of them dates 
from the beginning of the eighth century of the Christian era, and deals with events 
extending back for fourteen hundred years. The compilation of this work was one 


1 Reprinted by permission, from “Japan. Its History, Arts, and Literature.” Vol. I. Chapter II 
Published by the J. B. Millet Co., of Boston and Tokyo. Copyright, 1901, by J. B. Millet Co. 

2 The Koji-ki, or annals of ancient matters. 






JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


33 


of the most extraordinary feats ever undertaken. The compiler had to construct 
the sounds of his own tongue by means of ideographs devised for transcribing a foreign 
language. He had to render Japanese phonetically by using Chinese ideographs. 
It was as though a man should set himself to commit Shakespeare’s plays to writing 
by the aid of the cuneiform characters of Babylon. A book composed in the face 
of such difficulties could not convey a very clear idea of contemporary speech or 
thought. The same is true, though in a less degree, of the other two 3 volumes on 
which it is necessary to rely for knowledge of ancient Japan. 

It might reasonably be anticipated, arguing from the analogy of other nations, 
that some plain, practical theory would exist among the Japanese as to their own 
origin: that tradition would have supplied for them a proud creed identifying their 
forefathers with some of the renowned peoples of the earth, and that if the progenitors 
of the nimble-witted, active-bodied, refined, and high-spirited people now bidding 
so earnestly for a place in the comity of great nations had migrated originally from a 
land peopled by men possessing qualities, such as they themselves have for centuries 
displayed, many annals descriptive of their primeval home would have been handed 
down through the ages. There are no such theories, no such annals, no such traditions. 

When the Japanese first undertook to explain their own origin in the three books 
spoken of above, so unfettered were they by genuine reminiscences that they imme¬ 
diately had recourse to the supernatural and derived themselves from heaven. 
Reduced to its fundamental outlines, the legend they set down was that, in the earliest 
times, a group of the divine dwellers in the plains of high heaven descended to a 
place with a now unidentifiable name, and thence gradually pushing eastward, 
established themselves in the “land of sunrise,” giving to it a race of monarchs, 
direct scions of the goddess of light (Amate-rasu). Many things are related about 
these heaven-sent folk who peopled Japan hundreds of years before the Christian era. 
They are things that must be studied by any one des ring to make himself acquainted 
with the essence of her indigenous religion or her pictorial and decorative arts, for they 
there play a picturesque and prominent part. But they have nothing to do with 
sober history. Possibly it may be urged that nations whose traditions deal with a 
Mount Sinai, a pillar of cloud and fire, and an immaculate conception, have no 
right to reject everything supernatural in oriental annals. That superficial retort 
has, indeed, been made too often. But behind it there undoubtedly lurks in the 
inner consciousness of the educated and intelligent Japanese a resolve not to scru¬ 
tinize these things too closely. Whether or not the “age of the gods”—kami no yo— 
of which, as a child, he reads with implicit credence, and of which, as a man, he 
recognizes the political uses, should be openly relegated to the limbo of absurdities 
whether the deities had to take part in an immodest dance in order to lure the offended 
sun goddess from a cave to which her brother’s rudeness had driven her, thus plunging 
the universe in darkness; whether the god of impulse fought with the god of fire on 
the shores of the Island of Nine Provinces; whether the procreative divinities were 
inspired by a bird; whether the germs of a new civilization were carried across the 
sea by a prince begotten of the sunshine and born in the shape of a crimson jewel— 
these are not problems that receive very serious consideration in Japan, though neither 
a Colenso nor a Huxley has yet arisen to attack them publicly. They are rather alle¬ 
gories from which emerges the serviceable political doctrine that the Emperors of 
Japan, being of divine origin, rule by divine right. It is the Japanese historian’s 
method, or the Japanese mythologist’s manner, of describing an attribute claimed 
until very recently by all occidental sovereigns, and still asserted on behalf of some. 
As for the foreign student of Japan’s ancient history, these weird myths and romantic 
allegories have induced him to dismiss it as a purely imaginary product of later-day 
imagination. The transcendental elements woven into parts of the narrative dis¬ 
credit the whole in his eyes. And his skepticism is fortified by a generally accepted 
hypothesis that the events of the thirteen opening centuries of the story were pre¬ 
served solely by oral tradition. The three volumes which profess to tell about the 
primeval creators of Japan, about Jimmu, the first mortal ruler, and about his human 
successors during a dozen centuries, are supposed to be a collection of previously 
unwritten recollections, and it seems only logical to doubt whether the outlines of 
figures standing at the end of such a long avenue of hearsay can be anything but 
imaginary. Possibly that disbelief is too wholesale; possibly it is too much to conclude 
that the Japanese had no kind of writing prior to their acquisition of Chinese ideo¬ 
graphs in the fifth century of the Christian era. But there is little apparent hope 
that the student will ever be in a position to decide these questions conclusively. 
He must be content for the present to regard the annals of primeval Japan as an assem¬ 
blage of heterogeneous fragments from the traditions of South Sea Islanders, of central 


» The Nihon-gi (history of Japan) and the Koga-shu (ancient records). 





34 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


Asian tribes, of Manchurian Tartars, and of Siberian savages, who reached her shores 
at various epochs, sometimes drifted by ocean currents, sometimes crossing by ice- 
built bridges, sometimes migrating by less fortuitous routes. 

What these records, stripped of all th Q ir fabulous features, have to t°ll is this: 

At a remote date a certain race of highly civilized men—highly civilized by com¬ 
parison—arrived at the islands of Japan. Migrating from the south, the adventurers 
landed on the southern island, Kiushiu, and found a fair country covered with luxu¬ 
rious vegetation and sparsely populated by savages living like beasts of the field, 
having no organized system of administration and incapable of offering permanent 
resistance to the superior weapons and discipline of the invaders, who established 
themselves with little difficulty in the newly-found land. But on the main island 
two races of men very different from these savages had already gained a footing. One 
had its headquarters in the province of Izumo and claimed sovereignty over the whole 
country. The other was concentrated in Yamato. Neither of these races knew of the 
other’s existence, Izumo and Yamato being far apart. At the outset the immigrants 
who had newly arrived in Kiushiu imagined that they had to deal with the Izumo 
folk only. They began by sending envoys. The first of th°se, bribed by the Izumo 
rulers, made his home in the land he had been s°nt to spy out. The second forgot his 
duty in the arms of an Izumo beauty whose hair fell to her ankles. The third dis¬ 
charged his mission faithfully, but was put to death in Izumo. The sequel of this 
somewhat commonplace series of events was war. Putting forth their full strength, 
the southern invaders shattered the power of the Izumo court and received its sub¬ 
mission. But they did not transfer their own court'to the conquered province. 
Ignorant that Izumo was a mere fraction of the main island, they imagined that no 
more regions remained to be subjugated. By and by they discovered th°ir mistake, 
intelligence reached them that far away in the northeast a race of highly-cviilized 
men, who had originally come from beyond the sea in ships, were settled in the Prov¬ 
ince of Yamato, holding undisputed sway. To the conquest of these colonists, Jimmu, 
who then ruled the southern immigrants, set out on a campaign which lasted 15 
years and ended, after some fierce fighting, in the Yamato ruler’s acknowledging their 
consanguinitv with the invader and abdicating in his favor. 

Whether Jimmu’s story be purely a figment of later-day imagination, or whether 
it consists of poetically embellished facts, there can be no question about its interest, 
since it shows the kind of hero that subsequ°nt g Q n Q rations were dispos°d to picture 
as the founder of the sacred dynasty, the chmf of the Japanese race. The youngest 
of four sons, he was nevertheless s°lect°d by his “divine” father to succeed to the 
rulership of the little colony of immigrants then settled in Kiushiu, and his elder 
brothers obediently recognized this right of choice. He was not then called “Jimmu:” 
that is his posthumous name. Sanu, or Hiko Hohodemi, was his appellation, and he 
is represented in the light of a kind of viking. Learning of Yamato and its rulers from 
a traveler who visited Kiushiu, he embarked all his available forces in war vessels 
and set out upon a tour of aggression. Creeping along the eastern shore of Kiushiu, 
and finally entering the Inland Sea, the adventurers fought their way from point to 
point, landing sometimes to do battle with native tribes, sometimes to construct new 
war junks, until, after 15 years of fighting and wandering, they finally emerged from 
the northern end of the Inland Sea and established themselves in Yamato, destined 
to be thenceforth the imperial province of Japan. In this long series of campaigns the 
chieftain lost his three brothers. One fell in fight- two threw themselves into the 
sea to calm a tempest that threatened to destroy the flotilla. Such are the deaths 
that Japanese in all ages have regarded as ideal exits from this mortal scene—deaths 
by the sword and deaths of loyal self-sacrifice. To the leader himself, after his decease, 
the posthumous name of Jimmu, or “the man of divine bravery,” was given, typi¬ 
fying the honor that has alwavs attached to the profession of arms in Japan. The 
distance from this primitive viking’s starting point to the place where he established 
his capital and consummated his career of conquest can easily be traversed by a mod¬ 
ern steamer in twice as many hours as the number of years devoted by Jimmu and 
his followers to the task. That the craft in which they traveled were of the most 
inefficient type may be gathered from the fact that the viking’s progress eastward 
would have been finally interrupted by the narrow strip of water dividing Kiushiu 
from the main island of Japan had not a fisherman seated on a turtle emboldened him 
to strike seaward. Thenceforth the turtle assumed a leading place in the mythology 
of Japan—the type of longevity, the messenger of the marine deity, who dwelt in the 
crystal depths of the ocean, his palace peopled by lovely maidens. The goddess of 
the sun shone on Jimmu’s enterprise at times when tempest or fog threatened 
serious peril, and a kite, circling overhead, indicated the direction of inhabited dis¬ 
tricts when he and his warriors had lost their way among mountains and forests. 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


35 


How much of all this was transmitted by tradition, written or oral, to the compilers 
of Jimmu’s history in the eight century; how much A^as a mere reflection of national 
customs which had then become sacred, and on which the political scholars of the 
time desired to set the seal of antique sanction, who shall determine? If Sanu and his 
warriors brought with them the worship of the sun, that would offer an interesting in¬ 
ference as to their origin. If the aid that they received from his light was suggested 
solely by the grateful homage that rice cultivators, 13 centuries later, had learned to 
pay to his beneficence, then the oldest written records of Japan must be read as mere 
transcripts of the faiths and fashions of the era when they were compiled, not as genu¬ 
ine traditions transmitted from previous ages. But such distinctions have never been 
recognized by the Japanese. With them these annals of their race’s beginnings have 
always commanded as inviolable credence as the Testaments of Christianity used 
to command in the Occident. From the lithographs that embellish modern bank 
notes the sun looks down on the semidivine conqueror, Jimmu, and receives his hom¬ 
age. From the grand cordon of an order instituted by his hundred and twenty-seventh 
successor depends the kite that guided him through mountain fastnesses, and on a 
thousand works of art the genius of the tortoise shows him the path across the ocean. 
If these picturesque elements were added by subsequent writers to the outlines of an 
ordinary armed invasion by foreign adventurers, the nation has received them and 
cherishes them to this day as articles of a sacred faith. 

The annals here briefly summarized reveal three tides of more or less civilized im¬ 
migrants and a race of semibarbarous autochthons. All the learned researches of mod¬ 
ern archaeologists and ethnologists do not teach us much more. It is now known with 
tolerable certainty that the so-called autochthons were composed of two swarms of 
colonists, both coming from Siberia, though their advents were separated by a long 
interval. 

The first, archaeologically indicated by pit dwellings and shell mounds still extant, 
were the Koro-pok-guru, or “ cave men.” They are believed to be represented to-day 
by the inhabitants of Saghalien, the Kuriles, and southern Kamschatka. 

The second were the Ainu, a flat-faced, heavy-jawed hirsute people, who completely 
drove out their predecessors and took possession of the land. The Ainu of that period 
had much in common with animals. They burrowed in the ground for shelter; they 
recognized no distinction of sex in apparel or of consanguinity in intercourse; they 
clad themselves in skins; they drank blood; they practiced cannibalism; they were 
insensible to benefits and perpetually resentful of injuries; they resorted to savagely 
cruel forms of punsihment—severing the tendons of the legs, boiling the arms, slicing 
off the nose, etc.; they used stone implements, and, unceasingly resisting the civil¬ 
ized immigrants who subsequently reached the islands, they were driven northward 
by degrees, and finally pushed across the Tsugaru Strait into the island of Yezo. That 
long struggle, and the disasters and sufferings it entailed, radically changed the nature 
of the Ainu. They became timid, gentle, submissive folk; lost most of the faculties 
essential to survival in a racial contest, and dwindled to a mere remnant of semi¬ 
savages, incapable of progress, indifferent to improvement, and presenting a more 
and more vivid contrast to the energetic, intelligent, and ambitious Japanese. 

But these Japanese—who were they originally? Whence did the three or more 
tides of immigration set which ultimately coalesced to form the race now standing at 
the head of Oriental peoples? Strangely varying answers to this question have been 
furnished. Kampfer persuaded himself that the primeval Japanese were a section of 
the builders of the Tower of Babel. Hyde-Clarke identified them with Turano- 
Africans who traveled eastward through Egypt, China, and Japan. Macleod recog¬ 
nized in them one of the lost tribes of Israel. Several writers have regarded them as 
Malayan colonists. Griffin was content to think that they are modern Ainu, and recent 
scholars incline to the belief that they belonged to the Tartar-Mongolian stock of 
central Asia. Something of this diversity of view is due to the fact that the Japanese 
are not a pure race. They present several easily distinguisha’i le types; notably the 
patrician and the plebeian. This is not a question of mere coarseness in contrast 
with refinement; of the degeneration due to toil and exposure as compared with the 
improvement produced by gentle living and mental culture. The representative of 
the Japanese plebs has a conspicuously dark skin, prominent cheek bones, a large 
mouth, a robust and heavily boned physique, a flat nose, full straight eyes, and a re¬ 
ceding forehead. The aristocratic type is symmetrically and delicately built; his com¬ 
plexion varies from yellow to almost pure white; his eyes are narrow, set obliquely 
to the nose; the eyelids heavy; the eyebrows lofty; the mouth small; the face oval; 
the nose aquiline the hand remarkably slender and supple. 

Here are two radically distinct types. What is more, they have been distinguished 
by the Japanese themselves ever since any method of recording such distinctions ex- 


36 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


isted. For from the time when he first began to paint pictures, the Japanese artist 
recognized and represented only one type of male and female beauty—namely, that 
distinguished in a marked, often an exaggerated, degree by the features enumerated 
above as belonging to the patrician class. There has been no evolution in this matter. 
The painter had as clear a conception of his type 10 centuries ago as he has to-day. 
Nothing seems more natural than the supposition that this higher type represents the 
finally dominant race of immigrants; the lower, their less civilized opponents. 

The theory which seems to fit the facts best is that the Japanese are compounded 
of elements from central and southern Asia, and that they received their patrb ian 
type from the former, their plebeian from the latter. The Asiatic colonists arrived 
via Korea. But they were neither Koreans nor Chinese. That seems certain, though 
the evidence which proves it can not be detailed here. Chinese and Koreans came 
from time to time in later ages; came occasionallv in great numbers, and were absorbed 
into the Japanese race, leaving on it some faint traces of the amalgamation. But 
the original colonists did not set out from either China or Korea. Their birthplace 
was somewhere in the north of Central Asia. As for the South-Asian immigrants, they 
were drifted to Japan by a strange current called the “Black Tide” (Kuro-shiwo), 
which sweeps northward from the Philippines, and bending thence toward the east, 
touches the promontory of Kii and Yamato before shaping its course permanently 
away from the main island of Japan. It is true that in the chronological order sug¬ 
gested by early historv the southern colonists succeeded the northern and are sup¬ 
posed to have gained the mastery; whereas among the Japanese, as we now see them, 
the supremacy of the northern type appears to have been established for ages. That 
mav be explained, however, by an easv hypothesis—namelv, that although the onset 
of the impetuous southerns proved at first irresistible, thev ultimately coalesced with 
the tribes they had conquered, and in the end the principle of natural selection 
replaced the vanquished on their proper plane of eminence. But this distinction, 
it must be observed, is one of outward form rather than of moral attributes. Neither 
history nor observation furnishes any reason for asserting that the so-called “aristo¬ 
cratic,” or Mongoloid, cast of features accompanies a fuller endowment, of either 
phvsiral or mental qualities than the vulgar, or Malavan, cast. Numerically the 
patrician type constitutes only a small fraction of the nation, and seems to have been 
lacking in a majority of the country’s past leaders, as it is certainly lacking in a maior- 
itv of her present publicists, and even in the very creme de la creme of society. The 
male of the upper classes is not generally an attractive product of nature. He has 
neither commanding stature, refinement of features, nor weight of muscle. On the 
other hand, among the laboring populations, and especially among the seaside folk, 
numbers of men are found who, though below the average Anglo-Saxon or Teuton in 
bulk, are cast in a perfectly symmetrical mold and suggest great possibilities of muscu¬ 
lar effort and endurance. In short, though the aristocratic type has survived, and 
though its superior beauty is universallv recognized, it has not impressed itself com- 
pletelv on the nation, and there is no difficultv in conceiving that its representatives 
went down before the first rush of the southern invaders, but subsequently, by tenacity 
of resistance and by fortitude under suffering, recovered from a shock which would 
have crushed a lower grade of humanity. 

Histories that describe the manners and customs of a people have been rare in all 
a^es. The compilers of Japan’s first annals, in the eighth century, paid little atten¬ 
tion to this part of their task. Were it necessary to rely on their narrative solely 
for a knowledge of the primeval Japanese, the student would be meagerlv informed. 
But archaeology comes to his assistance. It raises these men of old from their graves, 
and reveals many particulars of their civilization which could never have been 
divined from the written records alone. 

The ancient Japanese—not the Koro-pok-guru or the Ainu, but the ancestors of the 
Japanese proper—buried their dead first in barrows and afterwards in dolmens. The 
barrow was merely a mound of earth heaped over the remains, after the manner of the 
Chinese. The dolmen was a stone chamber. It had walls constructed with blocks 
of stone, generally unhewn and rudely laid, but sometimes hewn and carefully fitted; 
its roof consisted of huge and ponderous slabs. It varied in form—sometimes taking 
the shape of a long gallery only, sometimes of a gallery and a chamber, and sometimes 
of a gallery and two chambers. Over it was built a mound of earth which occasionally 
assumed enormous dimensions, covering a space of 70 or 80 acres, rising to a height 
of as many feet, and requiring the labor of thousands of workmen. The builders of 
the barrows were in the bronze age of civilization, the constructors of the dolmens in 
the iron age. In the barrows are found weapons and implements of bronze and vessels 
of hand-made pottery; in the dolmens, weapons and implements of iron and vessels 
of wheel-turned pottery. There is an absolute line of division. No iron weapon 
nor any machine-made pottery occurs in a barrow, no bronze weapon nor any hand- 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


37 


made pottery in a dolmen. Are the barrow builders and the dolmen constructors 
to be regarded as distinct races or as men of the same race at different stages of its 
civilization? Barrow and dolmen bear common testimony to the fact that before 
the ancestors of the Japanese nation crossed the sea to their inland home they had 
already emerged from the stone age, for neither in barrow nor in dolmen gave stone 
weapons or implements been found, though these abound in the shell heaps and kitchen 
middens that constitute the relics of the Koro-pok-guru and the Ainu. But, on the 
other hand, barrow and dolmen introduce .their explorer to peoples who stood on 
different planes of industrial development. 

The progress of civilization is always gradual. A nation does not pass in one stride 
from burial in rude tumuli to sepulture in highly specialized forms of stone vaults, 
nor yet from a bronze age to an iron. It is therefore evident that the evolution of 
dolmen from barrow did not take place within Japan. The dolmen constructor must 
have completely emerged from the bronze age and abandoned the fashion of barrow 
burial before he reached Japan. Otherwise search would certainly disclose some 
transitional form between the barrow and the dolmen, and some iron implements 
would occur in the barrows or bronze weapons in the dolmens. If, then, the barrow 
builder and the dolmen constructor were racially identical, it would seem to follow 
that the latter succeeded the former by a long interval in the order of immigration 
and brought with him a greatly improved type of civilization evolved in the country 
of his origin. 

The reader will be naturally disposed to anticipate that the geographical distribu¬ 
tion of the dolmens and the barrows furnishes some aid in solving this problem. But 
though the exceptional number found on the coasts opposite to Korea tends to support 
the theory that the stream of Mongoloid immigration came chiefly from the Korean 
Peninsula via the island of Tsushima, there is not any local differentiation of one kind 
of sepulture from the other, and for the rest the grouping of the dolmens supplies 
no information except that their builders occupied the tract of country from the 
shores opposite Korea on the west to Musashi and the south of Shimotsuke on the east, 
and did not penetrate to the extreme northeast or to the regions of mountain and forest 
in the interior. 

Here another point suggests itself. If the fashion of the Japanese dolmen was intro¬ 
duced from abroad, evidences of its prototype should survive on the adjacent conti¬ 
nent of Asia. -If the numerous dolmens found on the coasts of Kiushiu and Isumo 
facing Korea are to be taken as indications that their constructors emigrated originally 
from the Korean Peninsula, then Korea also should contain similar dolmens, and if an 
ethnological connection existed between Japan and China in prehistoric days, China, 
too, should have dolmens. But no dolmens have hitherto been found in China, and 
the dolmens of Korea differ radically from those of Japan, being “merely cists with 
megalithic capstones” (Gowland). It has been shown, further, that dolmens similar 
to those of Japan are not to be found in any part of continental Asia eastward of the 
shores of the Caspian Sea, and that western Europe alone offers exactly analogous 
types. In short, from an ethnological point of view, the dolmens of Japan are as per¬ 
plexing as the dolmens of Europe, and the prospect of solving the riddle seems to be 
equally remote in both cases. All that can be affirmed is that the dolmens offer 
strong corroborative testimony to the truth of the Japanese historical narrative which 
represents Jimmu as the leader of the last and most highly civilized among the bands 
of colonists constituting the ancestors of the present Japanese race. Thus the “ divine 
warrior, ” after having been temporarily erased from the tablets of history by the 
modern sceptic of the west, is projected upon them once more from the newly opened 
graves of the primeval Japanese. It is true that there is an arithmetical difficulty. 
It has been supposed that the dolmens do not date from a period more remote than the 
third century before Christ, whereas Jimmu’s invasion is assigned to the seventh. 
But no great effort of imagination is required to effect a compromise between the 
uncertain chronology of the Japanese annals and the tentative estimates of modern 
archeologists. 

Some of the burial customs revealed by these ancient tombs resemble the habits 
of the Scythians as described by Herodotus. The Japanese did not, it is true, lay the 
corpse of a chieftain between sheets of gold, nor did they inter his favorite wife vdth 
similar pomp in an adjoining chamber, but they did deposit with him his weapons, 
his ornaments, and the trappings of his w r ar horse, and in remote times they followed 
the barbarous rule of burying alive, in the immediate vicinity of his sepulcher, his 
personal attendants, male and female, and probably also his steed. To the abroga¬ 
tion of that cruel rule is due much information about the garments worn in early 
epochs, for in the century immediately preceding the Christian era a kind-hearted 
emperor decided that clay figures should be substituted for human victims, and these 
figures, being modeled, however roughly, in the guise of the men and women of the 


38 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


time, tell what kind of costumes were worn and what was the manner of wearing them. 
Collecting all the available evidence, the story shapes itself into this: 

Prior to the third, or perhaps the fourth, century before the Christian era, when the 
dead were interred in barrows, not dolmens, the Japanese, though they stood on a 
plane considerably above the general level of Asiatic civilization, did not yet under¬ 
stand the forging of iron or the use of the potter’s wheel. They were still in the bronze 
age, and their weapons—swords, halberds, and arrowheads—were made of that metal. 
Concerning the fashion of their garments not much is known, but they used for purpose 
of personal adornment quaintly shaped objects of jasper, rock crystal, steatite, a,nd 
other stones. Then, owing probably to the advent of a second wave of immigration 
from the continent, the civilization of the nation was suddenly raised, and the country 
passed at once from the bronze to the iron age, with a corresponding development of 
industrial capacity in other directions, and with a novel method of sepulture having 
no exact prototype except in western Europe. The newcomers seem to have been 
not a race distinct from their predecessors but a second outgrowth of colonists from 
the same parent stem. Where that stem had its roots there is no clear indication, 
but it is evident that, during the interval between the first and the second migrations, 
the mother country had far excelled its colony in material civilization, so that, with 
the advent of the second band of wanderers, the condition of the Japanese underwent 
marked change. They laid aside their bronze weapons and began to use iron swords 
and spears and iron tipped arrows. A warrior carried one sword and, perhaps, a 
dagger. The sword had a blade which varied from 2\ feet to over 3 feet in length. 
These were not the curved weapons with curiously modeled faces and wonderful 
trenchancy which became so celebrated in later times. Straight, one-edged swords, 
formidable enough, but considerably inferior to the admirable katana of medieval 
and modern eras, they were sheathed in wooden scabbards having bands and hoops 
of copper, silver, or iron, by means of wdiich the weapon was suspended from the 
girdle. The guards were of iron, copper, or bronze, often coated with gold, and always 
having holes cut in them to render them lighter. Wood was the material used for 
hilt as well as for scabbard, but generally in the former case and sometimes in the 
latter a thin sheet of copper with gold plating enveloped the wood. Double barbs 
characherized the arrowhead, and as these projected about 4 inches beyond the shaft, 
a bow of great strength must have been used, though of only medium length. Armor 
does not seem to have been generally worn or to have served for covering any part of 
he body except the head and the breast. It was of iron, and it took the shape of 
thin bands of metal riveted together for casque and cuirass. Neither brassart, visor, 
nor greaves have been found in any dolmen, and though solerets of copper are among 
the objects exhumed, they appear to have been rather ornamental than defensive. 
As to shields, nothing is known. No trace of them has been found, and it seems a 
reasonable inference that they were not used. Horses evidently played an important 
part in the lives of the second batch of immigrants, for horse furniture constantly 
appears among the objects found in dolmens. The bit is almost identical with the 
co notion “snaffle” of the Occident. Made of iron, it has side rings or cheek pieces 
of the same metal, elaborately shaped and often sheeted with gilded copper. The 
saddle was of wood, peaked before and behind and braced with metal bands, and 
nu nerous ornaments of repousse iron covered with sheets of gilt or silvered copper 
were attached to the trappings. Among these ornaments a peculiar form of bell is 
present, an oblate hollow sphere having a long slit in its shell and containing a loose 
metal pellet. Stirrups are seldom found in the dolmens, and the rare specimens 
hitherto e'churned bear no resemblance to the large, heavy, shoe-shaped affairs of 
later ages, but are rather of the occidental type. 

The costume of these ancient Japanese had little in common with that of their mod¬ 
ern descendants. They wore an upper garment of woven stuff fashioned after the 
manner of a loosely fitting tunic, and confined at the waist by a girdle, and they had 
loose trousers reaching nearly to the feet. For ornaments, they used necklaces of 
beads or of rings—silver, stone, or glass; finger rings, sometimes of silver or gold, 
sonetimes of copper, bronze, or iron, plated with one of the precious metals; ring- 
shaped buttons; metal armlets; bands or plates of gilt copper, which were attached 
to the tunic; earrings of gold, and tiaras. Not one item in this catalogue, the tiara 
excepted, appears among the garments or personal ornaments of the Japanese since 
their history and habits began to be known to the outer world. No nation has under¬ 
gone a more radical change of taste in the matter of habiliments and adornments. The 
earrings, the necklace, the finger ring, the bracelet, and the band or plate of metal 
attached to the tunic, all these passed completely out of vogue so long ago that with¬ 
out the evidence of the contents of the dolmen it would be impossible to conceive 
the existence of such things in Japan. One of the most noteworthy features of the 
people’s habits in medieval or modern times is that, with the solitary exception of 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


39 


pms and fillets for the hair, they eschew every class of personal ornament. Yet the 
dolmens indicate that personal adornments were abundantly, if not profusely, em¬ 
ployed by the ancestors of these same Japanese in prehistoric days. Indeed, the only 
features common to the fashions of the Japanese as they are now known and the Jap¬ 
anese as their sepulchers reveal them are the rich decoration of the sword hilt and 
scabbard and of the war horse’s trappings. 

As to the food of these early people, it seems to have consisted of fish, flesh, and 
cereals. They used wine of some kind, though of its nature there is no knowledge, 
and their household utensils were of pottery, graceful in outline, but unglazed and 
archaically decorated. Whether or not they possessed cattle there is no evidence, 
nor yet is it known what means they employed to produce fire, though the fire drill 
appears to be the most probable. 

That they believed in a future state is evident, since they buried with the dead 
whatever implements an dweapons might be necessary in the life beyond the grave. 
That ancestral worship constituted an important part of their religious cult is proved 
by the offerings periodically made at the tombs of the deceased, and that idolatry 
was not procticed or superstition largely prevalent may be deduced from the com¬ 
plete absence of charms or amulets among the remains found in their sepulchers. 


[From the Report of the National Museum for 1890. Romyn Hitchcock. The Ancient Pit-Dwellers of 

Yezo, Japan. Washington, 1892.] 

When the first Emperor of Japan, known by the posthumos title Jimmu Tenno, 
whose traditional reign began 660 B. C., was on his imperial journey eastward from 
ancient Tsukushi, to establish the seat of government in Yamato, he came to a great 
“cave” or “apartment,” in which 80 tsuchi-gumo or cave-dwelling savages were 
awaiting him. The word tsuchi-gumo is usually translated “earth spiders.” but 
Prof. B. H. Chamberlain regards it as a corruption of tsuchi-gomori, or “earth hiders.” 
Whatever the original meaning may have been, there can be no doubt that it was 
applied to a savage people, who inhabited Japan before the coming of the Japanese. 

The ancient records of the Japanese contain many allusions to these dwellers in 
caves or dwellers under ground. In the reign of the Emperor Keiko two Kumaso 
braves were killed in a cave by Yamato-take. The Empress Jingo Kogo was wrecked 
among tsuchi-gumo. They are said to haA^e been numerous in Bungo and in other 
western Pro\ r inces, in Omi, in Yamato, and in other localities. 

The character of their dwellings is not clearly defined, owing to the ambiguous 
meaning of the Chinese character translated “cave.” In certain parts of Japan 
natural caves are numerous, but they are not common throughout the country. Arti¬ 
ficial caves are not uncommon, but I have endeavored to show, in an article treating 
of ancient Japanese burial customs, read before Section H of the American Associa¬ 
tion for the Advancement of Science at Toronto in 1889, that such caves were con¬ 
structed for interment of the dead and not for dwellings. Still other structures, 
chambers made by piling up huge rocks and heaping up mounds of earth to cover 
them, are also numerous in southern Japan, and these have been designated as caves 
by von Siebold, rather carelessly it seems to me. But these also were only burial 
chambers. 

Granting that mere opinions concerning such a subject are not of much value, I 
would only add that until some stronger evidence than \’on Siebold has adduced gives 
color to the idea that the early inhabitants of Japan lived in true caves, I hold that 
their dwellings were more probably of the character of the pit dwellings to be described 
in this article. It is true we do not find the ruins of such dwellings in the south, 
although they are numerous in Yezo. This is doubtless because all such ruins have 
been destroyed in the more populous island, where every available plot of ground has 
long been under cultivation. 

The fact is not to be overlooked, however, that the idea of cave life was familiar to 
the ancient Japanese. The well-known myth of the sun-goddess, who retired into a 
cave and closed the entrance with a stone, is significant of the truth of this assumption. 
It is not unlikely that the idea came from China and that true cave life was never 
practiced in Japan. 

There are still other people mentioned in the Japanese records, distinguished as 
Ebisu or hairy savages, who were contemporaneous with the earth hiders. It is not 
difficult to recognize in these the ancestors of the Ainos, who are now confined in 
Yezo. Not only is the historic evidence clear that the Ainos once lived in the main 
island as far south as Sendai, but we have numerous facts in support of the further 
conclusion that, in more ancient times, they occupied the coast as far south as the 



40 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


extreme end of Iviushiu. Such evidence we find in the distribution of geographical 
place-names, which are obviously of Aino origin, in the names of famous characters in 
Japanese mythology, which are certainly of Aino derivation, and in the contents of 
kitchen middens of shell heaps, which are numerous here and there along the coast. 

The writer has briefly summarized the evidence of Aino occupancy of Japan in the 
paper following this one. The character of the pottery found in the shell heaps is 
entirely different from any pottery made by the ancient Japanese. The material 
is the same as that of the Japanese sepulchral pottery, but the shapes of the vessels 
are not the same and the decoration upon them is absolutely distinctive. Strange 
as it may seem, the pottery of the shell heaps is far more elaborately decorated than 
any ancient pottery of Japanese origin. 

Plate LXXIII shows a number of specimens from the large collection of M. l’Abbe 
Furet, of Hakodate, which I was very kindly permitted to photograph. Many of 
these are covered with complex designs, such as are absolutely unknown on Japanese 
pottery. The small fragments representing parts of human figures are, so far as I am 
aware, unique. Owing to the absence from home , of the collector, I was unable to 
learn anything about them. 

The ancient Japanese pottery comes from burial mounds which are prehistoric or 
at least which date from a time before the year A. D. 400, when the authentic records 
of Japan begin. The pottery of the shell heaps, often designated as Aino pottery, 
although more elaborately decorated, must be older than this, and it would seem to 
afford indisputable evidence that the Japanese were preceded by an aboriginal people 
who were potters. We find the same kind of pottery in Yezo, in the shell heaps at 
Otaru, near Sapporo, on the small island Bentenjima, in Nemuro Harbor, about ancient 
pits in Kushiro, and about similar places on the Island of Yeterof. Associated with it 
everywhere are found arrowheads and other implements, such as may be found 
scattered over many parts of Yezo in the surface mold at the present day. 

The question then arises, to what people shall we attribute this spoil? It has been 
supposed that the shell mounds were left by the Ainos. This is the opinion of Prof. 
John Milne. But we immediately come face to face with the fact that the Ainos 
of the present day do not make pottery. The claim is made, upon rather insufficient 
ground, it seems to me, that the Ainos formerly did make pots: but if so, it is strange 
that in all my journeying among them I found no indications of such handiwork, 
nor of their need of such utensils. I can not bring myself to believe that a people 
who not only possessed that useful art, but who also acquired such a degree of artistic 
skill in decorating their productions, could have absolutely lost it. Certainly it 
could not have disappeared within a century, as we must suppose if we accept all 
the evidence we possess of Aino potmaking. 

It would be a bold assumption indeed to suppose that the dwellers in earth houses, 
the tsuchi-gumo, made the pottery. We have no evidence of this further than the 
fact that here and there fragments of pottery, and occasionally well-preserved vessels, 
are found about pits in Yezo and Yeterof, which, as I shall endeavor to show, are 
probably the ruins of a kind of pit-dwellings corresponding, in the opnion of the 
present writer, to those of the traditional tsuchi-gumo The pottery is there, and it 
assuredly was not made by the Japanese. It may be much older than we think, 
older than the Aino occupancy; older than even the traditions of the Japanese. 
Whoever were the people who made it, they spread over the whole country from 
southern Kiushiu to the bleak shores of Yezo and the adjacent islands. 

Who were the pit dwellers of Yezo? I have supposed them to be the tsuchi-gumo 
of tradition, but our only knowledge concerning these is found in the Japanese accounts 
unreliable enough, but at the same time not without some bearing on the question. 
For one would scarcely expect such circumstantial and numerous accounts of meetings 
and combats with dwellers in burrows or caves to be pure inventions. The word 
“cave” translated means “apartment”. They were not cave dwellers in the ordinary 
sense, for in nearly all the accounts of the people they seem to have lived in holes dug 
in the ground. We have the less reason to doubt this, since it is known that the 
Smelenkur of Saghalin construct earth-covered dwellings on the sides of hills, not in 
anv sense caves, and houses of another form will shortly be described which may, w r ith 
still more probability, represent the dwellings of the tsuchi-gumo. 

Mr. T. W. Blakiston first brought prominently into notice certain remarkable de¬ 
pressions or pits in the ground which he had observed in various parts of Yezo, and 
which he believed to be the remains of human habitations. In the summer of 1888 I 
made an extended journey to the inland, covering a distance of more than 800 miles 
on horseback, visting the Ainos and always looking for pits. The pits are numerous 
in places, usually on elevated land near the coast, or overlooking the mouths of rivers, 
presumably that the people might readily sight shoals of fish. The island known as 
Bentenjima, which forms a breakwater to Nemuro harbor, is covered with numerous 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


41 


pits. Plate LXX IV shows the town as seen from the residence of Mrs. H. Carpenter, 
a most devoted missionary, and the only foreign resident. The island is seen on the 
left. Just back of the three sheds or storehouses bordering on the water, where the 
bank is falling away, there is a small line of white, indicating the remains of a shell 
mound. It was at this spot that Prof. John Milne, in 1881, found some fragments of 
pottery, several arrow-heads, and one complete vase. I was only able to find a few 
broken shells, not having the means with me for digging. 

About four miles from Nemuro, in a northeasterly direction, on a bluff overlooking 
the sea, near the mouth of a small stream, there are seven pits, approximately square 
in shape, varying in length from 10 to 20 feet. They are not well preserved, but it 
was thought worth while to dig a trench across one of them in the hope of finding 
some pottery or arrowheads. The trench was dug 2 feet wide down at a stratum of 
clay, but nothing was found. 

On the island of Yeterof there are many hundreds of such pits on elevated knolls 
some distance from the coast, but overlooking a broad valley, through which a stream 
meanders for a long distance nearly parallel to the coast. It seems to me quite possible 
that at the time the dwellings represented by these pits were inhabited, the present 
river vallev was an immense arm of the sea, and a rich fishing ground. It was about 
these pits that Mr. Blakiston says fragments of pottery were picked up. I was, there¬ 
fore, quite anxious to explore one of them with a spade, and leaving my companions, 
Mr. Leroux and Mr. Odium, I set off in search for a habitation. After a long walk I 
found an Aino hut occupied by an old woman, and there obtained a dilapidated old 
Japanese instrument which was used fordigging. It was the best the country afforded, 
so I carried it back and we dug over the whole bottom of the pit, and also in several 
places outside, without finding a single article to reward us. We made some measure¬ 
ments of the pits in the vicinity, which were large and well preserved. 

******* 

Although I have not yet found a single piece of pottery, nor a chipped flint in any 
pit where I have dug, it does not follow that nothing of the kind is to be found about 
them. Other explorers have been more fortunate. The most promising locality for 
such explorations is at Kushiro, on the southeast coast of Yezo. Only want of the 
necessary time prevented me from digging about the pits there. In walking over the 
ground i picked up several small bits of old pottery which the rains had washed out, 
and the Japanese local officers showed me a small collection of vessels, tolerably well 
preserved, which had been found there. Some of the Kushiro pits are very large. 
I measured one, which was 32 feet across and 8 feet deep. 

The Ainos have a traditicn concerning a race of dwellers underground called koro- 
pok-guru, who formerly occupied the country. The Ainos claim to have subdued 
and exterminated them. We have no means of knowing whether this is a genuine 
tradition or a late invention to explain the existence of the pits. Presuming it to be 
the former, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the Aino account of dwarfs, who 
lived under ground, and the Japanese tales of earth spiders or tsuchi-gumo, refers to 
the same people. In the light of the observations related further on, it would also 
seem probable that the pits of Yezo are the ruins of the dwellings once occupied by 
them, now affording landmarks whereby we may trace the migrations of a once 
numerous people to their disappearance and oblivion. 

In the year 1878 Prof. John Milne (Trans. Seismologial Soc. of Japan, IX, 1886, pp. 
127, 128) visited Shumushu of Peroi Island, the most northern of the Kuriles. There, 
at the village of Myrup, he found a small colony of migratory people who made huts 
over excavations. His account of them is short. He writes: “Here there were three 
wooden houses which had been built by the Russians, and quite a number (perhaps 
a score) of half underground dwellings. On landing we found that all these were 
deserted, and in many cases even difficult to find, owing to the growth of wormwood 
and wild grasses. The inhabitants of the island, who call themselves Kurilsky, are 
23 in number. They chiefly live at a place called Seleno, about 4 miles distant. I 
mention these people, as they seem to be the only inhabitants of the Kuriles north 
of Iturup (Yeterof).” 

It appears that the dwellers in the deserted houses were migratory. Professor 
Milne has elsewhere declared that “these excavations have a striking resemblance 
to the pits which we find farther south. ’ ’ 

A Japanese author, Mr. Y. Hashiba, has published a description of some peculiar 
dwellings built over pits, which he found in Shonai, on the west coast of the northern 
part of the main island of Japan. I am indebted to Mr. P. Jaishon for a partial trans¬ 
lation of this article, which is written in Japanese. There are two huts, built over 
circular pits about 1 foot in depth by 2 to 3 yards in diameter. The framework of one 
is of reeds, that of the other of branches, over which there is a covering of earth 2 
feet thick. In the middle of the floor is a triangular fireplace. Other pits were found 


42 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


in the vicinity and fragments of pottery, hut the pottery is said to differ from that 
found in Yezo*. The points of difference I have been unable to learn. 

The Aleuts build also over excavations in the earth, erecting a framework of wood 
over which they pile a covering of sods. The entrance to such dwellings is through 
a low passage along which one must crawl. 

When the Japanese obtained the Kurile' Islands from Russia in exchange for Saghalin 
they determined to transfer the few inhabitants they found there to a more accessible 
spot. They selected the island of Shikotan, and although the people did not wish 
to change their abode, a steamer was sent to take them away, and thus a colony of 
about 100 persons was established in Shikotan. This island is situated nearly east 
of the extreme eastern limit of Yezo and south of Kunashiri. It is small, mountain¬ 
ous, not of much importance, and difficult to reach. 

Professor Milne was the first to tell me of these people, but he had not seen them. 
At Nemuro I made inquiries about them and resolved to visit them if possible. My 
Japanese servant bargained for a native fishing boat to carry me over, and the lowest 
price offered was $°0 for the trip. In such a craft the trip would not be without 
danger, and it might be a voyage of either a day or a week. Fortunately I had already 
made the acquaintance of two other foreigners who were traveling for pleasure and 
observation, and as we happened to be together in Nemuro, they had become inter¬ 
ested in my proposed visit to Shikotan. But the fishing-boat plan did not seem to 
be well received by either of them. M. Lereux, chef de musique at Tokyo, one day 
hailed me on the street with the news that in four days a steamer was going to Yeterof 
and would stop for us at Shikotan. Mr. Odium, a botanist, joined us, and at 3.45 
a. m., on August 9, the Yoshinomaru with her three foreign passengers and a load of 
salt for the fisheries of Yeterof, steamed from her anchorage in the harbor. I was on 
deck before sunrise, but already we were out on the heaving water. Toward the 
south the terraced shores of Yezo could be dimly traced as far as the eye could reach. 
Toward the north the volcanic range of the Menashi Peninsula was capped with snow. 
At half past 8 we were abreast of Kunashiri at the point where Chia-chia towers 
as a regular volcanic cone and slopes on one side in graceful, unbroken concave to 
the sea. Shikotan had already been sighted and now lay close at hand on the star¬ 
board bow, while Yeterof was visible in the distance. But it was noon before we 
anchored in the harbor, entering through a beautiful narrow passage between high, 
bold, grav cliffs of sandstone, concealed here and there with patches of green. Within 
lies a quiet bay with a verdant valley, inclosed on every hand by mountains and 
brush-covered hills. 

The settlement (PI. LXXV) consists of 18 houses arranged on opposite sides of a 
single street which runs directly back from the sandy beach. The number of in¬ 
habitants is at present uncertain—one informant told us 60, another 65. They are 
in appearance a well-formed, hardy people, but they are fast dying off. Subsisting 
on the most miserable food, bulbous roots, green tops of plants, and a pittance of rice 
from the Japanese Government; not properly clothed, and unable to obtain the fish 
and other things which in their native isles were so abundant, disease, especially 
consumption, has made fearful havoc among them. In five years their number has 
decreased one-third. The Japanese are now trying to better their condition, but past 
neglect has done its work. The people can not subsist without aid where they now 
live, and in any event they will soon disappear from the face of the earth. The 
picture of the group here shown (PI. LXXYI) is probably the only one ever made of 
these people. It was taken on the beach just below the Japanese official residence, 
which is conspicuous in the picture. In the background may be seen many plain 
slabs marking the final resting places of many poor souls who succumbed to the pri¬ 
vations of a few years in a home not of their own choosing. It will be noticed that 
the people are clothed in European dress. This is because they have so long 
been under Russian influences. In winter they are accustomed to dress in skins, 
but whether they are able to provide themselves with such warm clothing from the 
resources of Shikotan is very doubtful. 

The character of the dwellings will be more clearly understood from the illustra¬ 
tions than from any words of description. In a general way it may be said that each 
dwelling is composed of two parts—a front, thatched house, occupied in summer, and 
a winter earth house connected with the former by a covered passage. 

The thatched house very much resembles the houses of the Ainos. Plate LXXYII 
represents a view along the village street. There is the low front part used for storage 
and as a hall or passageway and the main portion which constitutes the living room. 
This room is usually nearly square, with a low door in front and a small door at the 
back opening into a passage which leads to the winter house. A good general view 
of a well-made house, and of the passage behind, is shown in Plate LXXVIII. En¬ 
tering from the front we find in the main room a rude and very dirty floor of boards, 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND TPIE UNITED STATES. 


43 


raised 6 inches from the ground, leaving a small inclosed space near the entrance 
from which one may step up onto the floor. There is a large, rectangular fireplace 
sunk in the floor about the middle, on which pieces of wood fitfully burn and fill the 
house with smoke. The rafters and crossbeams are covered with a shiny coating of 
oily soot. There is a smoke hole in the roof, but only the excess of smoke escapes. 
There are usually two small windows, one on each side, perhaps a foot square, and on 
one side a raised bunk with high side boards. 

Above the fire hangs a Japanese iron pot containing a more or less unsavory stew. 
The pot is coated with accumulated deposits within and soot without, and is probably 
never washed, if it is ever quite emptied. 

Around the walls hang articles of clothing, such as fur-lined gloves and shoes of 
fish-skin, rude baskets, skins of small animals, strips of hide for thongs, articles of dried 
fruit, etc. 

The winter house is of greater interest, because it probably represents the early pit 
dwellings of Yezo. One of my pictures (PI. LXXIX) shows two such houses 
standing alone. These are at the upper end of the village, and they are the only ones 
not connected with thatched houses. As will be seen, they are dome-shaped mounds 
of earth, with windows and a sort of chimney. Usually there is one such mound, 
sometimes there are two, back of a thatched house, as will be understood by a glance 
at the next* plate, which represents a view of the backs of the houses, showing the 
earth dwellings attached. 

The mounds are built over shallow excavations or pits in the ground about 12 to 18 
inches deep. A plan of one of the dwellings (fig. 65) shows the approximate size and 
proportions of the different rooms. The room of the earth-covered house on the left 
measured 2 meters wide, 2.25 meters deep, and 1.30 meters from the floor to the highest 
part of the ceiling. The beds were simply bunks, 38 centimeters from the floor and 
60 centimeters wide. The entrance is through a small, low doorway from the covered 
passage. This passage may run quite across the bac k of the thatched house and extend 
some distance beyond it, as in the house shown in Plate IXXX, which is the one from 
which the plan is drawn. As one descends into the hut, it seems very damp and 
gloomy. There is nothing to be seen but the bare floor, the sleeping bunks on the 
sides, and the fireplace made by piling up rounded stones in one corner. 

I have expressed the belief that these Shikotan huts are the modern representatives 
of the ancient pit dwellings of Yezo. Perhaps it will be very difficult or even im¬ 
possible to prove this connection; certainly the huts I saw were much smaller than 
many of the pits of Yezo, but I do not know what kind of a pit would be left by the 
falling in of one of these houses. I should think, after weathering a few years, it might 
not be very unlike the pits. On the other hand, it may be that the people,-having 
learned to build better above ground, no longer require such large and deep sub¬ 
terranean huts as in the past, and that these shallow excavations are but survivals of 
the old plan of construction, which is no longer useful. However this may be, it 
would seem that the ancient pit dwellers were driven from Yezo, perhaps by the 
Ainos, to the Kuriles, for the pits can be traced through Yeterof, and perhaps, in the 
smaller islands beyond. The existence of the pits in A eterof, the finding by Professor 
Milne of a small remnant of people on the same chain of islands who build houses over 
pits, and the finding of still others on Shikotan, may be fairly taken to indicate a con¬ 
nection between the people who dug the ancient pits and those who live in such dwell¬ 
ings at the present time. 

There was very little to collect in the way of specimens to represent the people. 
M. Leroux was so fortunate as to find a single musical instrument of the form repre¬ 
sented in Figure 66. Not another could be found of the same shape, which will be 
recognized as of Russian design. The people were making others of different shape, 
evidently in imitation of the Japanese Samisen. 

Figure 67, represents a carrying band used by women to carry their children on the 
back. The child sits in a curved wooden seat, and the band is passed over the chest 
of the bearer. 

We left Shikotan toward evening bound for Yeterof. The rocky bluffs rose clear 
and sharp behind us, soon to be shrouded in a veil of mist, which in this region is 
constantly forming and reforming with endless changes in the scenery of shore and 
mountain. Early next morning we arrived at Shiana, a small fishing station on the 
island, where a few Ainos and Japanese were found. At noon we were on board 
ready to start again, when suddenly a dense fog shut in around and held us, damp, 
cold, and miserable, in the little steamer until midnight. At half-past 5 the next 
morning we anchored at Bettobu, where we visited the pits already described, and 
then returned to Nemuro. 


44 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


[David Murray, Ph. D., LL. D. The Story of Japan. New York, 1894.] 

Doctor Baelz, a German scholar who has spent many years in Japan, has devoted 
much study to the races of Japan, and has made elaborate measurements both of living 
specimens and skeletons. His conclusions may be safely followed, as having been 
reached by adequate study and by personal investigation. Mainly following him, 
therefore, we give briefly the results of the best thought in regard to the ethnography 
of the races now inhabiting the Japanese Islands. 

The Ainos of the present day are the descendants of the original occupants of northern 
and central portions of the main island. Their share in the ancestry of the present 
Japanese people is not great, but still sensible, and has contributed to the personal 
peculiarities which are found in the inhabitants of these regions. They probably 
came originally from the continent by way of the Kurile Islands, or by the island of 
Saghalien. They belong to the northern group of the Mongolians who inhabit the 
regions about Kamtschatka and adjacent parts of Siberia. They have left marks of 
their occupancy on the main island as far south as the Hakone Pass, in the shell heaps, 
flint arrowheads, and remains of primitive pottery which are still found. These marks 
indicate a low degree of civilization, and the persistence with which they withstood 
the Japanese conquerors, and the harshness and contempt with which they were always 
treated, have prevented them from mingling to any great extent with their conquerors 
or accepting their culture. 

The twofold character of the Japanese race as it is seen at present can best be ex¬ 
plained by two extensive migrations from the continent. The first of these migrations 
probably took place from Korea, whence they landed on the main island in the Prov¬ 
ince of Izumo. This will account for the mythological legends which in the early 
Japanese accounts cluster to so great an extent around Izumo. It will also explain 
why it was that when Jimmu Tenno came on his expedition from the island of Kyushu 
he found on the main island inhabitants who in all essential particulars resembled 
his own forces and with whom he formed alliances. This first migration seems to have 
belonged to a rougher and more barbarous tribe of the Mongolian race and has given 
rise to the more robust and muscular element now found among the people. 

The second migration may have come across by the same route and landed on the 
island of Kyushu. They may have marched across the island or skirted around its 
southern cape and spread themselves out in the Province of Hyuga, where in the 
Japanese accounts we first find them. This migration probably occurred long after 
the first, and came evidently from a more cultured tribe of the great Mongolian race. 
That they came from the same race is evident from their understanding the same 
language and having habits and methods of government which were not a surprise to 
the newcomers, and in which they readily cooperated. On the contrary, the ruder 
tribes at the north of the main island were spoken of as Yemishi, that is, barbarians, 
and recognized from the first as different and inferior. 

While the natural and easiest route to Japan would be by way of the peninsula 
of Korea, and by the narrow straits about 125 miles in width, divided into two shorter 
parts by the island Tsushima lying about half way between, it is possible that this 
second migration may have taken place through Formosa and the Ryukyu Islands. 
This would perhaps account better for the Malay element which is claimed by many 
to be found in the population of the southern islands. This is attempted to be 
accounted for by the drifting of Malay castaways along the equatorial current upon 
the Ryukyu islands, whence they spread to the southern islands of Japan. But 
the existence of this Malay element is denied by many observers who have visited 
the Ryukyu Islands and aver that among the islanders there is no evidence of the 
existence at any time of a Malay immigration, that the language is only slightly 
different from the Japanese, and in personal appearance they are as like to the 
Koreans and Chinese as the Japanese themselves. 

Some of the most important measurements which Doctor Baelz has made of the 
Japanese races are here given, converted into English measures for more ready 
comprehension. 

The average height of the males among the Japanese as obtained by the measure¬ 
ments of skeletons, verified by measurements of living specimens, is 5.02 feet, ranging 
from 4.76 feet to 5.44 feet. The average height of the females measured was 4.66 
feet, ranging from 4.46 feet to 4.92 feet. Referring to the skulls measured by him 
he says that relatively they are large, as is always the case among people of small size. 

The measurements of the Ainos by Doctor Scheube as given by Doctor Rein are: 
Average height of males 4.9 feet to 5.2 feet, and of females 4.8 feet to 5 feet, which 
do not differ very greatly from the measurements of the Japanese as given by Doctor 
Baelz (p. 28). 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


45 


[Francis Ottiwell Adams, F. R. G. S. The History of Japan. London, 1874.] 

The origin of the Japanese of the present day is still involved in mystery, and it 
has not been determined with any degree of certainty whence the invaders came who 
dispossessed the aborigines. That they are a mixed race is clear; there is Chinese, 
there is Mongolian, and there is Corean blood amongst them; also, as it seems, Malay, 
and there may have been immigrations from the Polynesian Islands. 

The original inhabitants, the Aino, are now only to be seen in the northern island of 
Yezo. They are a hairy race, living in poverty in the rudest of huts, and speaking a 
language of their own (p. 6). 


[Charles MacFarlane. Japan, an Account, Geographical and Historical. London, 1852.] 

The stock to which they (the Japanese) really belong is the great Mongol race, 
which has peopled so vast a portion of the eastern world, and which now fills the unde¬ 
fined country of Tartary, a great part of the Russian Empire and central Asia, and is 
found in other offshoots in the Turkomans, Calmucks, Turks, Tongus, and the like. 
The same race conquered China, but at a period long subsequent to the peopling of 
Japan. 

Ethnologists are now agreed as to this Mongol assimilation (p. 162). 


[Albert Churchward, M. D., M. R. C. P., F. G. S., etc. Origin and Evolution of the Human Race. 

London, 1921.] 

The Mongolians still lead a nomadic life, and cattle raising is their principal in¬ 
dustry. At present their religion is I.amaism—a debased form of Buddhism which 
arose out of the Solar cult of the Egyptians, but, as stated above, they were originally 
Stellar cult people. Their prayer was Om-ma-ni pad-m6 Hum, i. e., Glory of Padma- 
Pani (the Lotus Bearer, i. e., Jlorus). The Korean people also belonged to the Stellar 
cult, but to-day they are a mixture of this and Buddhism. 

The Japanese at the present day are composed of several types, mixed or merged 
into one another. There is the Mongoloid with his aquiline nose, oblique eyes, 
high-arched eyebrows, and bird-like mouth, cream-colored skin, and slender frame; 
and the Malayan cast of countenance, high cheek bones, large prognathic mouth, 
full straight eyes, with a skin almost as dark as bronze, and robust, heavily-boned 
physique. 

In the north are the Hero cult Ainu, with luxuriant long hair and long hands, and 
all the anatomical features of the Hero cult peoples, Nilotic Negroes. 

The remains found, of old Stellar cult temples—skeletons buried in the thrice-bent 
position, facing north or south, with characteristic amulets in these tombs—the old 
signs, symbols, and glyphs, universally similar, found in many parts of the world, 
and the ivory tablets and Stellar cult implements discovered at Nagada, all point 
to the long past ages when the Stellar cult must have existed, and the many exodes 
that must have left the old mother country in different states of progressive culture, 
from the time of the end of their totemic Sociology to the time of the builders of the 
great pyramid and other huge temples and structures (all built by these people), 
found in many parts of the world. All their osteoanatomy corresponds, and may be 
classed, as far as this goes, as the “present type of man” (p. 351). 

******* 

The birthplace of the Mongolian and Turanian races was Egypt, and nowhere else 
can it be found. The earliest of these people left Egypt before the Chinese (see 
Chinese). The Botiya language being of an older form of hieroglyphic than the 
Chinese—who probably were the third to follow after—these former would drive out. 
and exterminate all the Nilotic Negro people they found when they conquered coun¬ 
tries, taking their women, with the exception of a few who would remain in isolated 
places, as we find them to-day (p. 352). 


[The First Outlines of a Systematic Anthropology of Asia. V. Giuffrida-Ruggeri, professor of anthropology 
in the Royal University of Naples, member'of Anthropological Society of Rome, Florence, etc. Trans¬ 
lated from Italian by Haranchandra Chakladar, Calcutta University Press, 1921.] 

The Japanese, about whom there can be no doubt that they are Xanthoderms, 
have been allocated to the unclassified groups of these * * * (p. 15). 

We have evidently here a dolicho-mesaticephalic type, which Hrdlicka finds also 
in a large portion of Tibet, in Mongalia, in various parts of Siberia, and this study 
of ours confirms it * * * and who are not entirely wanting neither in China, 
nor in Korea, nor in Japan. * * * (p. 65.) 


3887—22 - 4 






46 JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 

[H. Matsumoto. Notes on the Stone Age People of Japan, Reprinted from the American Anthropolo¬ 
gist (N. S.), vol. 23, No. 1, January-March, 1921.] 

Analytical studies of the racial types of the modern Japanese have been made by 
Professor Hasebe and Mr. Matsumura. As a result of their analytical studies, four 
racial types have been recognized to exist among the modern Japanese-Ishikawa and 
Okayama types by Professor Hasebe, and Chikuzen and Satsuma types by Mr. Mat¬ 
sumura. The Ishikawa type is characterized by the very short stature (5 feet to 
5 feet 1 inch), not very broad head (cephalic index, ca. 78 ±), straight and shallow 
face and weak jaws; the Okayama type by the tall stature (5 feet 5 inches or more), 
broad head (cephalic index, ca. 82 or more), convex and deep face and strong jaws; 
the Chikuzen type by the tall stature (5 feet 5 inches or more) and not very broad 
head (cephalic index, ca. 78 ±); and the Satsuma type by the very short stature 
(5 feet 1 inch or near that) and broad head (cephalic index ca. 82 ±) (p. 72). 

The Ishikawa type appears nearly, though not yet thoroughly, to correspond to the* 
Miyato dwarf type of the stone age, and the Chikuzen type also nearly to the Tsukumo 
tall type of the stone age. The Ishikawa and Chikuzen type may possibly be Mon- 
golianized survivors of the Miyato dwarf and Tsukumo tall types, respectively. In 
the stone age already, the shorter type of the sites of Tsukumo and Ko appears to 
be more broad-headed than the typical Miyato dwarf type of the site of Miyato Island. 
Then, there may be a certain probability that both these dwarf types belong to local 
varieties of one and the same branch which show the divergency, being more long¬ 
headed northeastward and more broad-headed south westward. If this view be 
correct we may expect the presence of a racial type characterized by short stature 
and broad head in the extreme southwestern Japan. Then the Satsuma type fits 
strictly to the expected racial type. The Okayama type, which has been looked upon 
by Professor Hasebe himself to be the Korean type of the Mongolian stock, is not yet 
actually discovered from the stone age sites of Japan. This type might have in¬ 
vaded Japan either at the close of the stone age or at the dawn of the metal age 
(p. 73). 

* * * Among the Pau-Ainu, the Aoshima type was the first arrival in Japan. 
* * *. 

The next to arrive or arise in Japan was the Miyato dwarf type and possibly also its 
presumed cousins in western Japan. This type is found from the medieval stone age 
of northeastern Japan, as a race mixed with the. foregoing type; and its presumed 
cousins are found from the medieval stone age of western Japan as a race mixed with 
the following type. Nowadays, it lives in Hokaido as a race mixed with the following 
type, and in northeastern Japan and in the north central part of the main island as a 
mixed race more or less Mongolianized; and its presumed cousins live in southwestern 
Japan as a mixed race more or less Mongolianized. This type and its presumed 
cousins are separated from each other in recent distribution by the two following 
newcomers: 

The third to arrive or to arise in Japan was the Tsukumo tall type. It is found from 
the medieval stone age of western Japan as a race mixed with the presumed cousins 
of the Miyato type. Nowadays it lives in the northern part of western Japan as a 
mixed race Mongolianized; and also scattered in every part of Japan, for this type 
appears to be very common in the former knight class of Japan. 

The last newcomer to Japan was the Okayama type of the Mongolian stock. This 
type is not yet actually found from the stone age of Japan. Nowadays, it occu¬ 
pies middle western Japan, including the former capital of Japan and its vicinity 
(p. 75). * * * 


[American Journal of Physical Anthropology, October-December, 1920. The Form of the Parotid Gland 
in Japanese, by Chikanosuke Ogawa, Department of Anatomy, Kyoto University, Japan. Washington 
p. 424.] * 

CONCLUSIONS. 

The results of the present study appear to show that there is no appreciable dif¬ 
ference in the volume of the parotid in the Japanese and the Europeans, and no 
marked difference was noticed in its general form, but some racial differences are 
indicated in the sagittal diameter of the gland, in its anterior process, in the con¬ 
nective tissue between the gland and the sternocleidomastoid muscle, in the pro¬ 
cessus retromandibularis, processus post-styloideus, and processus pharyngeus. There 
are signs that much more marked differences exist between the parotid of man and that 
of at least some other primates. All of this calls for further observations. 



47 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 

[MacCaughey (V.). Race Mixture in Hawaii. J. Hered., 1919, X 41-47, p. 492.] 

The Hawaiian Islands are remarkable for the diversity of races represented and for 
the varied conjugal race mingling which has taken place in this tiny island world 
during the past 150 years. 

In 1918 the population of Hawaii, in round numbers, was as follows: 


Asiatics. 153,500 

Japanese. 105,000 

Chinese. 23, 000 

Koreans. 5, 000 

Filipinos. 20, 000 

Polynesians. 40, 000 

Hawaiians. 23, 000 

Caucasian-Hawaiians. 11 , 000 

Chinese-Hawaiians. 6, 000 

Latins. 31, 000 

Portuguese. 23,000 

Spanish. 2, 000 

Porto Ricans. 6, 000 

Americans, Scotch, British, Germans, Russians, etc. 22,000 


The Chinese began to come to Hawaii in 1870. At present over half the Chinese 
men marry Chinese women, while most Chinese women marry Chinese men. A large 
percentage of the Chinese men marry Hawaiian or part-Hawaiian women. Very few 
Chinese women marry Hawaiian or part-Hawaiian men. Only one Chinese man has 
married an American woman; a few Chinese women have been married by American 
men. An appreciable amount o;f mingling has taken place between the Chinese 
and the Portuguese; Chinese and Chinese-Hawaiian men marry Portuguese, Spanish, 
Hawaiian, Caucasian-Hawaiian, etc. The most significant feature is the large number 
of mixed marriages, in which the Chinese, Hawaiian, and Caucasian strains inter¬ 
mingle. 

Japanese immigration began in 1886; that of Koreans about 1900. In general, 
Japanese marry only Japanese; they show remarkable racial aloofness, more so as a 
race than any other in Hawaii. A few Japanese men have married Hawaiian, part- 
Hawaiian, and Portuguese women; only one has married an American woman. There 
are surprising few marriages between the Japanese and the other Asiatic peoples in 
Hawaii; a few Japanese women have been married by Chinese and Koreans. 

All the Korean women have married only Koreans. The Korean men have married 
not only Koreans but also women of Hawaiian and part Hawaiian blood. 

The Japanese and Koreans contrast strongly with the Chinese in race mixtures, 
the former groups evincing strong clannishness in marital selections; the latter groups 
freely breeding “out.” In general, Asiatics in Hawaii breed more freely with Cau¬ 
casian stock than they do among themselves. 

The majority of Portuguese men marry Portuguese. Their national preferences, 
outside their own group, in quantitative sequence, are: Hawaiian, Caucassian- 
Hawaiian, Spanish, Chinese-Hawaiian. 

Most Spanish men married Spanish women. Spanish women marry freely outside 
their nationality. A small amount of intermarrying takes place between Spanish 
and Portuguese. A notable number of Spanish women are married by Porto Ricans 
and Filipinos. The intermarrying between Spanish and Hawaiian and part Hawaiian 
is very slight, especially when contrasted with the Portuguese in this regard. 

Most Hawaiian men marry Hawaiians. Hawaiian women marry freely outside 
their own race. Notable among the racial preferences of Hawaiian men are their 
marriages with Caucassian-Hawaiians, Chinese-Hawaiians, and Portuguese. 

Only one-half of the American men married Americans; most of the American 
women married Americans. In numerical order, American men married Americans, 
Portuguese, Caucasian-Hawaiians, Hawaiians, British, German, Chinese-Hawaiians, 
and Porto* Ricans. Only 13 American men and 3 American women married Asiatics; 
15 American men married Chinese-Hawaiians, 223 married women of Hawaiian or 
part-Hawaiian blood. The 116 American women who did not marry American men 
married, in order: British, Caucasian-Hawaiians, Germans, Hawaiians, Portuguese. 
















48 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


[A. H. Keane. Man: Past and Present. Cambridge, 1920.] 

Mongol proper: .Sharra (Eastern), Kalmak (Western), Buryat (Siberian), Mongol. 
(Main divisions.) 

Tungus: Tungus proper, Manchu, Gold, Oroch, Lamut. 

Korean: Japanese and Liu-Kiu. 

Turki: Yakut, Kirghiz, Uzbeg, Tarancki, Kara-Kalpak, Nogai, Turkoman, Ana¬ 
tolian, Osmanli. 

Finno-Ugrian: Baltic Finn, Lapp, Samoyed, Cheremiss, Yotyak, Vogul, Ostyak, 
Bulgar, Magyar. 

East Siberian. Yukaghir, Chukchi, Koryak, Kamchadale, Gilyak (pp. 255-256). 

THE JAPANESE. 

The present population of Japan, according to E. Baelz, shows the following types. 
The first and most important is the Manchu-Korean type, characteristic of North 
China and Korea, and most frequent among the upper classes in Japan. The stature 
is conspicuously tall, the effect being heightened by slender and elegant figure. The 
face is long, with more or less oblique eyes but no marked prominence of the cheek 
bones. The nose is aquiline, the chin slightly receding. With this type is associated 
a narrow chest, giving an air of elegance rather than of muscularity, an effect which 
is enhanced by the extremely delicate hands with long slender fingers. The second 
type is the Mongol, and presents a distinct contrast, with strong and squarely built 
figure, broad face, prominent cheek bones, oblique eyes, flat nose, and wide mouth. 
This type is not common in the Japanese islands. The third type, more conspicuous 
than either of the preceding, is the Malay. The stature is small, with well-knit 
frame, and broad, well-developed chest. The face is generally round, the nose short, 
jaws and chin frequently projecting. None of these three types represents the aborig¬ 
inal race of Japan, for there seems to be no doubt that the Ainu, who now survive in 
parts of the northern island of Yezo, occupied a greater area in earlier times, and to 
them the prehistoric shell mounds and other remains are usually attributed. The 
Ainu are thickly and strongly built, but differ from all other oriental types in the 
hairiness of face and body. The head is long, with a cephalic idex of 77.8. Face 
and nose are broad, and the eves are horizontal, not oblique, lacking the Mongolian 
fold. 

ORIGINS—CONSTITUENT ELEMENTS. 

It is generally assumed that this population represents the easterly migration of 
that long-headed type which can be traced across the continents of Europe and Asia 
in the Stone Age, and that their entrance into the islands was effected at a time 
when the channel separating them from the mainland was neither so vide nor so deep 
as at the present time. Later Manchu-Korean invaders from the west, Mongols from 
the south, and Malays from the east pressed the aborigines farther and farther north, to 
Yezo, Sakhalin, and the Kuriles. But it is possible that the Ainu were not the ear¬ 
liest inhabitants of Japan, for they themseves bear witness to predecessors, the Koro- 
pok-guru, mentioned above (p. 260). Neither is the assumption of kinship between 
the Ainu and prehistoric populations of Western Europe accepted without demur. 
Deniker, while acknowledging the resemblance to certain European types, classes the 
Ainu as a separate race, the Palaeasiatics. For while in head-length, prominent 
superciliary ridges, hairiness, and the form of the nose, they may be compared to Rus¬ 
sians, Todas, and Australians, their skin color, prominent cheek-bones and other so¬ 
matic features make any close affinity impossible. 

JAPANESE TYPE. 

In spite of these various ingredients the Japanese people may be regarded as fairly 
homogeneous. Apart from some tall and robust persons amongst the upper classes, 
and athletes, acrobats, and wrestlers, the general impression that the Japanese are a 
short finely moulded race is fully borne out by the now regularly recorded military 
measurements of recruits, showing for height an average of 1.585 millimeters (5 feet 
2\ inches) to 1.639 millimeters (5 feet 4^ inches) for chest 33 inches, and dispropor¬ 
tionately short legs. Other distinctive characters, all tending to stamp a certain indi¬ 
viduality on the people, taken as a whole, and irrespective of local peculiarities, are 
a flat forehead, great distance between the eyebrows, a very small nose with raised 
nostrils, no glabella, no perceptible nasal root; an active wiry figure; the exposed 
skin less yellow than the Chinese, and rather inclining to a light fawn, but the covered 
parts very light, some say even white; the eyes also less oblique, and all other char¬ 
acteristically Mongol features generally softened, except the black lank hair, which 
in transverse section is perhaps even rounder than that of most other Mongol peoples 
(pp. 294-296). shh 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


49 


[Dicti jnary of Races or Peoples. S. Doc. No. 662, 61st Cong., 3dsess., Decembers, 1910. March 4,1911, vol. 9.] 

The number of the chief divisions or basic races of mankind is more in dispute at 
the present time than when Linnaeus proposed to classify them into four or Blumen- 
bach into five great races. Some writers have reduced the number of such basic races 
to three, while others have proposed 15, 29, or even 63. In preparing this dictionary, 
however, the author deemed it reasonable to follow the classification employed by 
Blumenbaeh, which school geographies have made most familiar to Americans, viz, 
the Caucasian, Ethiopian, Mongolian, Malay, and American, or, as familiarly called, 
the white, black, yellow, brown, and red races. 

A chart printed in this dictionary entitled “ Comparative classification of immigrant 
races or peoples, ” traces the Japanese as follows: 


Race. 

Stock. 

Group. 

People. 

Mongolian. 

Sibiric. 

Japanese. 

Japanese and Korean. 


Aino: A primitive Caucasian-like ‘people in Japan, now numbering less than 20,000. 
(See Japanese, Caucasian, and Mongolian.) 

Japanese: The people of Japan. With the exception of the “Arctic Group” the 
Japanese and Koreans form the easternmost group of the great Sibiric branch, which, 
with the Sinitic branch (Chinese, etc.), constitutes the Mongolian race. (See these 
terms.) As was said in the article on Chinese, the Japanese and Koreans stand much 
nearer than the Chinese, especially in language, to the Finns, Lapps, Magyars, and 
Turks of Europe, who are the westernmost descendants of the Mongolian race. The 
languages of all these people belong to the agglutinative family, while Chinese is 
monosyllabic. 

Although many people may mistake a Japanese face for Chinese, the Mongolian 
traits are much less pronounced. The skin is much less yellow, the eyes less oblique. 
The hair, however, is true Mongolian, black and round in section, and the nose is 
small. These physical differences no doubt indicate that the Japanese are of mixed 
origin. In the south there is probably a later Malay admixture. In some respects 
their early culture resembled that of the Philippines of to-day. Then there is an 
undoubted white strain in Japan. The Ainos, the earliest inhabitants of Japan, 
are one of the most truly Caucasian-like people in appearance in eastern Asia. They 
have dwindled away to less than 20,000 under the pressure of the Mongolian invasion 
from the mainland, but they have left their impress upon the Japanese race. The 
“fine” type of the aristocracy, the Japanese ideal, as distinct from the “coarse” type 
recognized by students of the Japanese of to-day, is perhaps due to the Aino. 

The social characteristics and importance of the Japanese people are well known 
from recent history. It is generally well understood that Christianity makes very 
slow progress. Shintoism, a mixture of nature and ancestor worship * * *. 

Mongol or Mongolic: The subdivision of the Sibiric branch of the Mongolian race or 
grand division of mankind from which the latter has taken its name. They are inter¬ 
esting historically in that at different times they have ruled India and still rule, 
through the Manchu dynasty, China. In the thirteenth century, headed by the des¬ 
cendants of Genghis Khan, they penetrated into Europe as far as Germany. Their 
only representatives now in Europe are the Kalmuks (see) of southeastern Russia, 
a decadent stock. The Bureau of Immigration used ‘ ‘ Mongolic ’ ’ in a still wider sense 
to include also the East Indians, Pacific Islanders, and Filipinos. (See all these.) 

The Mongolians or natives of Mongolia are comparatively unimportant in immigra¬ 
tion and international questions, being small in number and located in the interior of 
Asia, back of China proper. Estimates of their population rate them at only from 
2,000,000 to 5,000,000 in numbers, while of Chinese (see) there a,re perhaps 300,000,000. 
The Mongols are not so closely related linguistically to the Chinese as they are to the 
Japanese and even to the Finns, Turks, and Magyars. The Mongols proper extend at 
present westward over waste regions as far as the Turko-Tataric populations of Russian 
central Asia. As they extend on the East nearly to Peking, -a few may have found 
their way to the United States as “Chinese” immigrants, from whom they are not 
easily distinguishable. 

Mongolian, Mongol, Mongolic, Mongoloid, Asiatic, or yellow race: That grand 
division of mankind, which is typically, as to color, yellowish, and as to origin, culture, 
and present habitat, Asiatic. An important subject in immigration. The Mongolian 
and the Caucasian are the two largest “races” or divisions of mankind, the latter 
being somewhat the larger because it includes the greater part of the population of 
India. The term “Asiatic” may Ue used in a geographical sense to include India. 









50 


JAPANESE IN HA WAIT ANI) THE UNITED STATES. 


In this sense the Asiatics are far greater in number than either the Mongolians or 
the Europeans. 

Just as the Caucasian race extends into southwestern and southern Asia, so the 
Mongolian race extends far into Europe, embracing not only the Lapps of Scandinavia, 
the Finns, Cossacks, and many other peoples of Russia, and the Turks of southern 
Europe, but even the Magyars of Hungary, the most advanced of all the Europeans 
of Mongolian origin. The main western branches of the Mongolians, although Euro¬ 
peanized in blood as well as in culture, still possess a Turanian speech. 

The Mongolians have also extended from time immemorial over the Arctic coast 
of North America, if we accept the view most generally held as to the origin of the 
Eskimos. Indeed, many ethnologists so define “Mongolian ” as to include the entire 
American and Malav races. Huxley’s term “Mongoloid” includes not only these 
but also the Polynesians and “Indonesians,” who are considered by some to represent 
an ancient Caucasian element in the Pacific. Huxley therefore finds no race but 
the Mongoloid on or near the Pacific Ocean, with the exception of a “Negroid” 
element in Malaysia. The word “Mongolian” is sometimes used in a more restricted 
sense as equivalent to “Mongol” (see 1 ), the name of a small group of Japanese-like 
people living northwest of China proper in Mongolia. The term “Mongolic grand 
division” is used by the Bureau of Immigration in the widest sense of all, to include 
the Malays, as well as the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans. 

All of northern, central, and eastern Asia was originally occupied exclusively by 
the Mongolian race, if we exclude from this grand division the doubtful Eskimos near 
Bearing Sea and the Ainos of northern Japan and the Malays and Negritos of the Malay 
Peninsula. 

Brinton divides the Mongolian race into two great branches, the Sinitic and the 
Sibiric. The former is the more populous and is confined to Asia, being subdivided 
into the Chinese, Indo-Chinese, and Tibetan groups (see these). The Sibiric branch 
includes all the invaders into Europe above mentioned, who are therefore more closely 
related linguistically to the Japanese than to the Chinese. This branch includes, 
besides the Japanese, Arctic, and Tungusic groups, the Finnic, Tataric, and Mongolic. 
It is the three last named groups that are represented in Europe; the Finnic by the 
Finns, Lapps, Esths, Livs, Mordvinians, and others of Russia, and the Magyars of 
Hungary; the Tataric group by the Kirghiz-Kazaks, Turkomans, and kindred tribes 
in Russia, and the Osmanlis, or Turks of Turkey; and the Mongolic group by the 
Kalmuks of eastern Russia. (See articles on the above and summary under Ural- 
Altaic.) 

Southwestern Asia is practically occupied by Caucasians, with the exception of the 
Turkish race in Anatolia (Asia Minor). West of the Hindus come their Aryan kins¬ 
men, the Afghans, Beluchis, Persians, Armenians, and Kurds, many of whom are 
Mohammedan; then come the Semites, including the Jews, Arabs, arid Syrians. 

Among many other definitions of “Mongolian race” which vary from tho^e given 
above, it is most important to notice those illustrated in the usages of Keane and 
Linnaeus. These authorities consider Blumenbach’s Malay race (see) to be only a 
branch of the Mongolian, while they do not put the American Indian in that category, 
as does Huxley. Furthermore, Keane, following Quatrefages in having no Malay race 
into which he can place the “Indonesians” and Polynesians of the Pacific, considers 
these to be an aberrant Caucasian stock. 

Friedrich Muller, the German ethnologist, considers the American and Malay races 
to be distinct from the Mongolian, but separates from the latter a “Hyperborean” 
race, which includes the Eskimo and certain Siberian tribes. Far more reprehensible 
was the tendency, once widespread, to find “Lappic” skulls and vestiges of “Tura¬ 
nian” speech everywhere in Europe. Fragments of the latter speech were even 
detected in America. The word “Turanian” finally became discredited and was 
generally replaced by “Ural-Altaic” (see). It is sufficient at this point to say that 
this term denotes the agglutinative speech of the Sibiric branch of Mongolians, the 
latter including, as just said, the Magyars and others in Europe. The Sinitic branch, 
typified by the Chinese, possesses a monosyllabic speech. Both of these types of 
speech differ widely from the inflected tongues of western Europe and southwestern 
Asia. In this particular the Malays resemble the Sibiric branch. 

Passing to physical characteristics, but little need be said. The Chinese type is 
well known. Close observation will show that the pecularity of the “Mongolian eye ” 
does not consist in its being set obliquely, but in having a fold of the upper lid at the 
inner angle of the eye, which covers the caruncle. The latter is exposed in the Cauca¬ 
sian eye and generally amongst the modified Mongolians of Europe. This fold is found 
also amongst Malays. Finally, the short, or brachvcephalic, type of head is more 
characteristic of the Mongolian and Malay races than of any other. The eastern 
Eskimos however, like most American Indians and negroes, have long heads. The 
short-headed type of European found in central Europe is traced by some to an Asiatic 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


51 


origin. If this view be correct, the type goes back to prehistoric times. It may be 
safely said that no considerable invasion of the Mongolian race in Europe can be proven 
except those of the Christian era, as above indicated. 

[Dr. E. Baelz, Prehistoric Japan, 1876-1902, professor Imperial Japanese University of Tokyo. From the 
Smithsonian report for 1907, pp. 523-547, Washington, 1908.] 

In previous addresses before the Ger tan Anthropological Congress in 1885 and five 
years ago before this society I have considered the eastern Asiatic race peculiarities 
in detail and have distinguished in Japan three essential elements: First, the north 
or true Mongolian type; second, the south Mongolian or Malayan type; and third, the 
Aino type, which is at present becoming less and less frequent. 

******* 

It is hardly possible to draw a sharp line between the Malayan and Mongolian 
types, as the transition from one to the other all over eastern Asia is so gradual that 
every attempt to make an exact division has failed. For example, we find in Japan, 
Korea, and China a large number of people who might be termed pure Malays, and, 
on the other hand, in southeast Asia we may find the most marked slant-eyed Mon¬ 
golian type, of which the present nominal Emperor of Annam is a good example 
(p. 523). 

******* 

Fo much can be said, however, that the north or true Mongolian division may be 
distinguished by their comparatively large size, large head, prominent cheek bones, 
more or less slanted eyes, and meso or brachycephalic skull. 

******* 

In Japanese these types are seldom found pure; much oftener they are mixed. 

The assertion that the Japanese are essentially identical in race with the inhabi¬ 
tants of Korea and the larger part of China was formerly strongly combated. Investi¬ 
gators were too much influenced by outward appearances, especially by dress and 
methods of wearing the hair. Even such a keen and much-traveled observer as Lord 
Curzon, late Viceroy of India, allowed himself to be led astray. He declared that the 
Koreans were such a characteristic race that it was impossible to confound them with 
the indigenes of another land, wherever they might be met. To contradict this, I 
have the testimony of any number of Japanese and Koreans that they themselves 
can not distinguish one from the other if constume and methods of hairdressing are 
the same; and in comparing Japanese and Chinese the same holds good. Even con¬ 
ceding that the Chinese are generally larger and have softer features, the difference is 
hardly greater or even as great as between different types in Germany or between the 
English and Germans. 

Therefore, I can not understand how Donitz can say “the Japanese are so different 
at first sight from the Mongolians who inhabit the neighboring mainland that it is hard 
to conceive how there could be any direct connection between them.” 

Clearly he, too, had been deceived by outward appearances, especially by the differ¬ 
ence of clothing and hairdressing (p. 524). 


[Edward B. Tyler, D. C. L., F. R. S., Anthropology. New York, 1904.] 

Turning to another district of the world, the Mongoloid type of man has its best 
marked representatives on the vast steppes of northern Asia. The skin is brownish- 
yellow, the hair of the head black, coarse and long, but face-hair scanty. The skull 
is charterized by breadth, projection of cheek bones, and forward position of the outer 
edge of the orbits, which, as well as the slightness of brow-ridges, the slanting aperture 
of the eyes, and the snub nose, are observable. 

The Mongoloid race is immense in range and numbers. The great nations of south¬ 
east Asia show their connection with it in the familiar complexion and features of 
the Chinese and Japanese (p. 96). 


[Daniel G. Brinton, Races and Peoples, Philadelphia, 1901.] 

PHYSICAL TRAITS OF THE ASIAN RACE. 

As the last mentioned adjective intimates (yellow), the prevailing color is yellowish, 
tending in different regions toward a brown or white, but never reaching the clear 
white of the western European. The hair is straight, coarse, and black, scanty on 
the face, almost absent on the body. The stature is medium or undersized, the legs 
thin, and the muscular power inferior to that of the Eurafrican race. The skull has a 
tendency to globular form (meso or brachy cephalic), the face is round, the cheek 




52 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


bones prominent, the nose flat at the bridge and depressed at the extremity, the eyes 
are small and black and the lids do not open fully at the inner angle, giving the peculiar 
appearance known as the oblique or Mongolian eye (p. 196). 

Like other mixed peoples, the Japanese vary so much in height, form of skull, hue, 
and bodily proportions that it is impracticable to set up any fixed type for them further 
than to say that their general Asiatic aspect is usually unmistakable to the trained 
eye (p. 217). 


[Dr. Michael Haberlandt; translated by J. H. Loewe; Ethnology; London, K00.] 

THE MONGOLIAN NATIONS. 

If we separate farther Asia and the peninsula of Hindustan from the huge Asiatic 
continent, a territory of gigantic proportions still remains which, regarded as a whole, 
is populated by nations belonging to one uniform race of men of short stature and yel¬ 
low skin. Ethnography describes this community of peoples as Mongolians, or a 
race with Mongolian characteristics. It is neither uniformity of language and cul¬ 
ture, nor historical affinity which connects these races by a common bond, but rather 
the anthropological physical side of their natures which firmly unites the entire 
population of central, east, and north Asia, a bond which overrides all geographical 
and cultural considerations. All the races of this widely distributed group have 
the following points in common—a stunted growth, short heads (brachycephalous), 
obliquely slit eyes, prominent cheek bones, yellowish skins, and straight, dark, 
and mostly black hair. Even to an inexperienced eye it is not difficult to recognize 
a member of this race in any given instance, but beyond these there are no other 
characteristics. 

Having regard to general features only, the mass of these nations are divided by 
language into two large groups—those employing a monosyllabic language, among 
whom are the Chinese, Tibetans, and the inhabitants of the Indo-Chinese peninsula, 
and those speaking a language of dissyllabic roots, and comprising the inhabitants of 
the Ural-Altai, the Japanese, and the Koreans. If we attentively consider the devel¬ 
opment and affinity of nationalism in this huge territory, we are confronted by still 
larger numbers and greater divisions which only give way to extended uniformity 
in the course of thousands of years of culture, and through the medium of state forma¬ 
tions upon the soil of China and Japan and to some extent in the Indo-Chinese penin¬ 
sula. And the degrees of culture shown by all these nations, ranging from the primi¬ 
tive poverty of rude jungle life to the heights of Chinese and Japanese political civili¬ 
zation, are as various as we should expect, taking into consideration the widely diver¬ 
gent geographical configuration of the different countries (p. 129). 

THE JAPANESE. 

The Japanese are in cultural importance the second nation in eastern Asia. In 
spite of their modern civilization, ethnologists class them after the Chinese. Their 
island Kingdom is well organized, mountainous, and endowed with a happy climate. 
The Japanese of the present day are a mixed race, springing from Mongolian immi¬ 
grants in prehistoric times and from an indigenous population, remnants of which 
are still to be found among the unkempt hunting and fisher folk of the Ainos in the 
islands of Jesso and Sachalln. These prehistoric migrations probably originated from 
the Chinese mainland through Korea from south to north. Recently a share in the 
formation of the Japanese people has been attributed to the Malay as well as to the 
Mongolian races. 

Language, as we have already remarked, clearly distinguishes the Japanese from 
the Chinese and Malayo-Chinese groups, amongst which their physical characteristics 
would otherwise easily have classed them. It is polysyllabic and agglutinative. 
The present written and spoken language is indeed a mixture of two entirely different 
dialects, the old Japanese and the Chinese. Compared with the Europeans the 
Japanese are short of stature: the men average scarcely 5 feet in height, the women 
considerably less. Amongst the people different types are clearly to be distinguished. 
The present population of Japan exceeds 36,000,000. The physical constitution of the 
Japanese is on the whole weak (p. 137). 


[J. Deniker, Sc. D., Races of Man. London, 1900.] 

Eour principal varieties of hair are usually distinguished in anthropology, accord¬ 
ing to their aspect and their nature—straight, wavy, frizzy, and woolly. It is easy 
to form a clear idea at first sight of the differences which are presented by these 




JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 53 


varieties, hut the most careful examination shows that the differences are deeper, 
and can be pursued even into the microscopic structure of the hair. 

Straight and smooth hair (droit or lisse in French, straff or schlict in German) is 
ordinarilv rectilinear, and falls heavily in bands on the sides of the head; such is the 
hair of the Chinese, the Mongols, and of American Indians. Straight hair is ordi¬ 
narily stiff and coarse, hut is sometimes found tolerably fine (p. 38). 

Does there exist, anv difference of form between straight, waved, frizzy, or woolly 
hair? The microscopical examination of transverse sections of the hair allows us 
to reply affirmatively to this question. This examination, already applied to the 
hair in 1822 by Heusinger, then successively by Blower (of Philadelphia), Kolliker, 
Pruner Bey. Latteux, and Waldeyer, has yielded results which have been vigorously 
discussed, and are still debatable if we cling to the individual and absolute figures, 
comparing sections made according to defective methods, or carried out on different 
levels of the hair. But if we calculate the index—that is to say. the relation of the 
breadth to the length (=100) of the section (and that in a great number of indi¬ 
vidual cases)—we obtain satisfactory results, as Topinard and Ranke have shown 
in general, as also Baelz in the case of the Japanese, and Montano in the case of the 
races of the Malay Archipelago. 

If we consider a great number of microscopical sections, all obtained from the same 
level of the hair, we note that straight hair gives a circular section, whilst woolly hair 
gives one in the form of a lengthened ellipse This ellispe is less extended, a little 
more filled out, in the sections of wavy hair (p. 42). 

The presence of temporary spots of pigment noticed among new-born Japanese by 
Grimm and Baelz, among the Chinese by Matignon, and among the Tagals of the 
Philippines by Collignon, and among the Eskimo by Soren-Hansen is more 
puzzling. These are somewhat large blue, gray, or black spots situated in the sacro¬ 
lumbar region and on the buttocks, which disappear about the age of 2, 3, or 5 years 
(P- -51). 

The numerical expression of the cranial form is given in anthropology by what is 
called the cephalic index—that is to say, by the relation of the length of the cranium 
ordinarily measured from the glabella to the most prominent point of the occiput) to 
its greatest breadth. Reducing uniformly the first of these measurements to 100, 
we obtain the different figures for the breadth, which expresses the cranial form; thus 
very round skulls have 85, 90, and even 100 (extreme individual limit) for index 
while elongated skulls may have an index of 70, of 65, and even 58 (extreme indi¬ 
vidual limit). According to Broca’s nomenclature, skulls having indices between 
77.7 and 80 are mesaticephalic, or mesocephalic; those having indices below this figure 
are subdolichocephalic (up to 75), or dolichocephalic" (beyond 75); those which have 
the index above 80 are sub-brachycephalic (up to 83.3), or brachycephalic (above 
83.3) (p. 57). 

In the same way, the presence of a suture which divides into two, more or less im¬ 
perfectly, the malar bone appears to be a special character of Ainu and Japanese 
crania; Hilgendorf has even proposed to call the lower portion of the malar bone thus 
formed the os japonicum (p. 68). 

Next to the form of the head, that of the face is of great importance in recognizing 
races (p. 76). 

The superciliary arches may be absent (Mongolian races). * * * The cheek 
bones may be little developed (Europeans) or very prominent (Mongolians, Bushman, 
etc.). 

* * * * * * * 


The eyes furnish also some differences of form. We distinguish the ordinary eye, 
as in our countries, and the oblique or narrowed Mongolian eye. * * * The essen¬ 
tial characters of the Mongolian eye consist, as Metchnikof has shown, in a puffiness 
of the upper eyelid, which turns down at the inner angle of the narrowed eye, and, 
instead of being free, as in the ordinary eye, is folded toward the eyeball, forming a 
fixed fold in front of the movable ciliary edge; this last becomes invisible and the 
eyelashes are scarcely seen (p. 77). 

The nose, by the variety and fixity of its forms, presents one of the best characters 
for distinguishing races (p. 78). 

Besides the general form of the nose given by the nasal index, there remain a host 
of descriptive characters which may be observed in this organ. It may be more or 
less flattened (examples: Negroes, Melanesians, Mongolians), or more or less promi¬ 
nent (Europeans, Jews, Arabs). * * * Broad noses are most frequently flat¬ 
tened, but the flattening may also extend to narrow noses, as for example, among the 
Mongols (p. 80). . . 

Chinese characters have been adopted by only one people with an agglutinative 
language, the Japanese, who, along with these characters (Mana) use another method 
of writing (Kana), which is syllabic (p. 141). 


54 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


The Japanese exhibit, like so many other people, a certain diversity in their physical 
type; the variations fluctuate between two principal forms. The fine type, which 
may be chiefly observed in the upper classes of society, is characterized by a tall, 
slim figure; a relative dolichocephalic, elongated face, straight eyes in the men, more 
■or less oblique and Mongoloid in the women, thin convex or straight noses, etc. The 
coarse type, common to the mass of the people, is marked by the following characters: 
A thick-set body, rounded skull, broad face with prominent cheek bones, slightly 
■oblique eyes, flattish nose, wide mouth (Balz). These two types may have been the 
result of crossings between Mongol subraces (northern and southern) and Indonesian 
or even Polynesian elements. The influence of the Ainu blood is shown only in 
Northern Nippon (p. 387). 

In a general way the Japanese are of short stature (1 m. 59 for men, 1 m. 47 for women) 
rather robust, and well proportioned. The color of the skin varies from pale yellow, 
almost white, to brownish yellow. * * * At birth, there is an accumulation of 
pigments on the median line of the belly and pigmental spots. The pilous system is 
scantily developed, except in cases where an admixture of Ainu blood may be sus¬ 
pected. The head is mesaticephalic as a rule (ceph, ind. on the liv. sub. 78.2) with 
a tendency to brachycephaly in the gross type, to dolichocephaly in the fine type. 
The skull, which is capacious, exhibits two pecularities: the os japonicum and the 
particular conformation of the upper jaw, which is very low and broad, without the 
canine fossa (p. 389). 


[Alfred C. Haddon, D. Sc.; The Study of Man. New York, 1898.] 

The inhabitants of large areas of Asia are distinctly brachycephalic, but among 
the mixed peoples of China and Japan mesaticephalism is prevalent. In the northern 
parts of the latter country one finds the remarkable Ainus, or Ainos, who differ in so 
many respects from their Japanese neighbors and conquerors. These very interesting 
people were formerly much more numerous than they are at present; they probably 
occupied the whole or the greater part of the Japanese archipelago, and also consider¬ 
able tracts of the mainland opposite. They are short—the men range from about 
1,545 mm. (5 ft. | in.) to 1,600 mm. (5 ft. 3 in.); the women are some 75 mm. (3 inches) 
shorter. The color of their skin, though of various shades of brown, has a reddish tinge, 
and more resembles that of a Southern European than an Asiatic; the coarse black 
hair is long and wavy, and is so profusely developed that the Ainus are the hairiest of 
mankind. From a careful consideration of the facts de Quatrefages comes to the con¬ 
clusion that “the Ainus are fundamentally a white and dolichocephalic race, more or 
less altered by other ethnic elements, of which one, at least, is essentially Monoglic ” 
(p. 70). 

Amongst the brachycephalic Asiatics are to be found the Negritoes. So far as their 
cranial index is concerned it is practically identical with that of the average Japanese, 
who may be regarded as very characteristic Mongoloids (p. 72). 


[Chamberlain. Things Japanese. Tokyo, 1898.] 

1. Physical characteristics. As stated in the article entitled “Race,” the Japanese 
are Mongols; that is, they are distinguished by a yellowish skin, straight black hair, 
scanty beard, almost total absence of hair on the arms, legs, and chest, broadish 
prominent cheek bones, and more or less obliquely set eyes. These, with the other 
characteristics to be mentioned presently, are common both to the more slenderly 
built, oval-faced aristocracy and to the pudding-faced Gombei, the “Hodge” of Japa¬ 
nese Arcadia. Compared with people of European race the average Japanese has a 
long body and short legs, a large skull with a tendency to prognathism (projecting 
jaws), a flat nose, coarse hair, scanty eyelashes, puffy eyelids, a sallow complexion, 
and a low stature. The average stature of Japanese men is about the same as the 
average stature of European women. The women are proportionately smaller. The 
lower classes are mostly strong, with well-developed arms, legs, and chests. The 
upper classes are too often weakly. 

The above description will perhaps not b v e considered flattering. But it is not ours; 
it is the doctors’. Then, too, ideals of beauty differ from land to land. We Anglo- 
Saxons consider ourselves a handsome race. But what are we still, in the eyes of 
the majority of the Japanese people, but a set of big, red, hairy barbarians with green 
eyes (p. 222)? 

******* 

Race: There has been much strife among the learned on this question: To which 
race do the Japanese belong? Not scientific considerations only, but religious and 
other prejudices have been imported into the discussion. One pious member of the 








. JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


55 


Scotch Kirk derives the Japanese from the Lost Tribes of Israel. An enthusiastic 
German professor, on the other hand, Doctor Wernich, takes up the cudgels to defend 
so charming a nation against “the reproach of Mongolism, ” whatever that may be. 
The two greatest authorities on the subject, Baelz and Rein, say, purely and simply 
that the Japanese are Mongols. We incline to follow Baelz in his hypothesis of two 
chief streams of immigration, both coming from Korea, and both gradually spreading 
eastward and northward. The first of these immigrations would have supplied the 
round or so-called “pudding-faced” type common among the lower classes. The 
second would have supplied the aristocratic type, with its more oval outline, thinner 
nose, more slanting eyes, and smaller mouth—the type to which Japanese actors en¬ 
deavor to conform when representing noblemen and heroes. Be it remarked that 
both these types are Mongol. Both have the yellowish skin, the straight hair, the 
scanty beard, the broadish skull, the more or less oblique eyes, and the high cheek 
bones, which characterize all well-established branches of the Mongol race. It is 
historically certain that some Mongols have come over and settled in Japan, namely, 
Koreans and Chinamen, at various epochs of authentic Japanese history (p. 346). 


THE YELLOW RACES. 

[Dr. E. T. Hamy. Smithsonian Report, 1895. Washington, 1896.] 

The Koreans and the Japanese belong, without contradiction, at least up to a certain 
point, to the great mass of peoples of the yellow race. The Koreans, whom I have 
shown you in photographs, used so greatly to resemble Tibetans that they were often 
mistaken the one for the other, but there are others who make the impression as if 
they were the offspring of intermarriages, and more than one modern traveler, unable 
to explain some national variations that might be called out of order has brought 
in the most unexpected elements to account for these strange mixtures, from the 
Aleutian (Chaille-Long-Bey) to the Turk himself (Varat). 

As to the Japanese, the immense anthropological collection (54 skeletons, 403 skulls, 
27 pelves, etc.) sent to the museum by M. Steenackers shows the superabundant 
multiplicity of their various sources. It can hereafter no longer be doubted that the 
population of the Archipelago of the Rising Sun is connected by bonds of kinship 
with its neighbors on the yellow continent. But it is also becoming more and more 
certain that some southern elements have played a very important part in their 
history as a nation. The Malays (to adopt a very general term), whose fleets ravaged 
the coasts of Tsiampa as late as the eighth century, had at times previous to that a 
powerful influence on the northern islands and have left behind them numerous 
traces of their intervention. I shall take pleasure in seeing the ingenious and varied 
arguments brought to life by which M. Metchnikoff supports the very precise views 
which he has formed on that subject. 

One last national element, which has remained very modest in its influence, because 
it was driven out with a kind of repugnance by the Japanese, is the Aino, the hairy 
race of Kuriles, of Sakhalin and of Yeso. I have told you what little I knew of these 
singular islanders, whom for the moment I am utterly unable to classify. The Ainos 
are, on an average, akin to the Chinese by their cephalic index, and I have pro¬ 
visionally placed them between the Chinese and the Eskimo, whilst most readily 
admitting that this classification is altogether provisional only (p. 516). 


[Doctor Koganei. Translated from the German, Contribution to Physiological Anthropology of Aino. 

Tokyo, 1894.] 

While all the peoples who stand in a nearer and nearest relations with the Aino 
are of the Mongolian type, there have been expressed so far as the anthropological 
relations of the Aino are concerned very different opinions (p. 325). 


[Address delivered at the anniversary meeting of the Anthrolopogical Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 
January 27, 1885, on the Classification of the Varieteis of the Human Species, by the president. Prof. 
W. H. Flower, LL. D., V. P. R. S., P.Z. S.,etc., director of the natural history department of the British 
Museum. London, 1885.] 

The most ordinary observation is sufficient to demonstrate the fact that certain 
groups of men are strongly marked from others by definite characters common to all 
members of the group, and transmitted regularly to their descendents by the laws of 
inheritance (p. 378). 

The most characteristic example of the second great type, the Mongolian or Xan¬ 
thous, or “Yellow,” have a yellow or brownish complexion; coarse, straight hair, 





56 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


without any tendency to curl, and nearly round in section, on all other parts of the 
surface except the scalp, scanty and late in appearing; a skull of variable form, mostly 
mesocephalic (though extremes both of dolichocephaly and brachycephaly are found 
in certain groups of this tribe); a broad flat face, with prominent, anteriorly-projecting 
malar bones (platvopic face); nose small, mesorhine or leptorhine; orbits high and 
round, with very little development of glabella or superciliary ridges; eyes sunken, 
and with the aperture between the lids narrow; in the most typical members of the 
group with vertical fold of skin over the inner canthus, and with the outer angle 
slightly elevated; jaws mesognathus: teeth of moderate size (mesodont) (p. 381). 

II. The principal groups that can be arranged around the Mongolian tvpe are: (a) 
The Eskimo, who appear to be a branch of the typical north Asiatic Mongols, * * * 
have gradually developed characters which are strongly expressed modifications of 
those seen in their allies who still remain on the western side of Bering Strait. 
Every special characteristic which distinguishes a Japanese from the average of man¬ 
kind is seen in the Eskimo in an exaggerated degree, so that there can be no doubt 
about their being derived from the same stock (p. 387). 

* * * The Japanese are said by their language to be allied rather to the northern 
than to the following (southern) branches of the Mongolian stock (p. 388). 

(c) The next great division of Mongoloid people is the Malay, subtypical, it is true, 
but to which an easy transition can be traced from the most characteristic members of 
the type. 


[J. J. Rein. Japan. Travels and Researches, translated from the German. New York, 1884.] 

The natives of Japan are divided into two branches of the Mongolian race, the 
Japanese proper and the Ainos. The latter inhabit the region to the north of the 
Tsugaru Straits, the islands of Yezo, the Kuriles, and the southern portion of Sa- 
ghalien as far as the fiftieth degree of latitude. Doenitz and Hilgendorf, and later on 
Scheube, have instituted a minute investigation of their physical conformation, and 
have published its results in the “ Mittheil ungen der Deutschen Gesellschaft Osta- 
siens.” These show it to be an undoubted fact “that the Ainos are Mongolians who 
differ less perhaps from the Japanese than the Germans from the Rumanians. ” 
Though the straight eyes and firm features, and above all, the strong growth of the 
beard among the men, iends them a certain likeness to Europeans, this is only apparent, 
and disappears on a nearer examination. 

In stature the Aino3 are small, like the Japanese, but stronger and broader shoul¬ 
dered. Their average height, according to Doctor Scheube, is 1.5 to. 1.6 meters, and 
from 1.45 to 1.53 of the females. Their complexion, although materially influenced 
by the sun and the want of cleanliness, is darker than that of the average Japanese, has 
a brownish tint, and tends to pass into the coloring of the Berber or, perhaps, still more 
into that of the North American Indian. The Mongolian type is strongly marked in 
the form of the face and in the hair. It is easily to be recognized in the flat somewhat 
angular face with projecting cheek bones and thickish lips; in the broad, depressed 
base of the nose, with its wide nostrils and flatly rounded end; the eyes, though not 
placed obliquely, are nevertheless of slit shape and well characterized especially by 
the fold on the upper eyelid. The apparently high forehead is flat and slopes back¬ 
ward (p. 383). 


[Dr. Paul Topinard. Anthropology. London, 1878, pp. 198-203.] 

CLASSIFICATION OF RACES. 

The first attempt at classification was made in the year 1772, by F. Bernier, a French 
traveler, who made out that there were four races: The white in Europe, the yellow in 
Asia, the black in Africa, and Laplanders in the north. 

The second was that of Linnaeus. His genus Man includes three species: Homo 
sapiens, homo ferus, and homo monstruosus. His savage man is dumb, covered with 
hair, and walks on all fours. Among his monstrous men he includes the microce- 
phales and the plagiocephales. His homo sapiens includes four varieties; the Euro¬ 
pean, with flaxen hair, blue eyes, and light skin; the Asiatic, with blackish hair, 
brown eyes, and yellowish skin; the African, with black wooly hair, black skin, flat 
nose, and thick lips; and the American, with tawny skin, long black hair, and beard¬ 
less chin. 

Buff on did not classify, he described. He recognized more particularly a northern 
race, a Malay race, and made a distinction between Hottentots and other African 
Negroes. The first classification which possessed a certain amount of prestige was; 




JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


57 


that of Blumenbach. The Gottingen professor described five human varieties: The 
Caucasian, the Mongolian, the Ethiopian, the American, and the Malay. He was the 
originator of the title of Caucasian, which is now in use and which he employed 
because the Caucasus is near Mount Ararat, upon which the ark rested after the flood. 
But a period soon arrived when a reaction took place among a certain number of 
naturalists. Three pairs alone having survived the universal deluge, as a matter of 
course all the races of mankind now living upon the earth descended from them. 

Curvier admits three races, the white or Caucasian, the Mongolian, and the Negro. 
Desormais divides the first into three, the Indo-Pelasgian, the Armenian (Semitic), 
and the Scytho-Tartarian; and includes in the second the Kalmucks, the Mantchus, 
the Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans, and the inhabitants of Micronesia (the Mari¬ 
anne and.Caroline Isles). He does not speak of the divisions of the Negro race; but, 
not knowing where to find a place in his classification for the Malays, Paupans, Lapps, 
Esquimaux, and Americans, he rejects them altogether from his category. “The red 
color of the Indians of America,” however, he does “not consider sufficient ground 
for placing them in a distinct race.” The authority of Blumenbach, however, coun¬ 
terbalanced that of Cuvier, and classic authors, with some dissentients, divided them 
between the five races of the one and the three races of the other. Lacepede, Prichard, 
Jacquinot, and Flourens were in favor of three, the last named recognizing about 33 
different types. 

The first opposition came from Virey, in 1801, who gave out that the human family 
was composed of two species, the white and the black, each being divided into six 
races, and these in their turn into families. 

Bory de Saint-Vincent and A. Desmoulins were of the same opinion. The former, 
taking up the propositions of La Peyrere, declared that Adam was “the father of the 
Jews only, and that the differences between the human races are sufficiently great 
to merit the designation of species.” He admitted 15, many of which in their turn 
included many races, namely, the Japhetic or European, the Arabian, the Hindoo, 
the Scythian (Turks), the Sinican (Chinese), the Hyperborean, the Neptunian (Malays, 
Polynesians, and Papous), the Australian, the Columbian and American, the Ethio¬ 
pian, the Kaffir, the Melanesian, the Hottentot. Among the secondary races a few 
deserve to be mentioned: The Arabian species, comprising the Adamic Jews and Ara¬ 
bians, and the Atlantic race (Berbers). 

A. Desmoulins at the same time as, or rather before, Bory de Saint-Vincent, raised 
the number of human species to 16. He mentions two which had escaped Bory, 
namely, the Kurilian and the Papuan. The Caucasian species is taken in a different 
acceptation to that of Blumenbach and Cuvier: it merely designates a particular group 
of the Caucasus, including the M’ingrelians, the Georgians, and the Armenians. His 
division of the Mongolian species into the Indo-Sinican, the Mongol, and the Hyper¬ 
borean race is equally worthy of attention. It is to be regretted that A. Desmoulins 
should have brought into his Scythian or European species the Finnish race. But 
in his arrangement are found unforeseen affinities which science has not confirmed, but 
which perhaps will deserve to be one day taken again into consideration. It would 
be impossible to enumerate all the methods of classification which have been pro¬ 
posed, from the four races of Leibnitz, the four varieties of Kant, the five groups 
(divided into 26 families) of Morton, or the nine centers of Agassiz, to the more recent 
classifications of M. Fr. Muller and M. Hoeckel. Three only will engage our attention 
before we close this subject: the method of Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, which was 
the first to make classification depend exclusively on the methodical arrangement of 
a certain number of physical characteristics; that of Mr. Huxley, which has a certain 
amount of originality; that of Mr. M. De Qxatrefages, which examines into the whole 
of nature in accordance with the principles of the natural method. 

The classifications of Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire are two in number. In the 
first he distributes his 11 principal races according to the character of the hair, the 
flatness or projecting form of the nose, the color of the skin, the shape of the eyes, 
and the size of the lower extremities. In the second he admits the following human 
types: The first, or Caucasian, with the face oval and the jaws vertical (orthognathous); 
the second, or Mongolian, with the face broad in consequence of the prominence of 
the check-bones (eurygnathous); the third, or Ethiopian, with projecting jaws (progna¬ 
thous); and the fourth, or Hottentot type, with wide cheek bones and projecting 
jaws (eurygnathous and prognathous). This division has not been settled finally 
but the bases of it are excellent. 

The classification of Mr. Huxley includes two primary divisions—the ulotrichi, 
with woolly hair, and the leiostrichi, with smooth hair. (1) Ulotrichi. Color varying 
from yellow-brown to the jettest black; the hair and eyes dark, and with only a few 
exceptions they are dolichocephales (elongated head). Example: The Negroes of 
Africa and the Papous. (2) Leiostrichi. These are divisible into four groups—the 


58 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


australoid group, with dark skin, hair, and eyes; the hair long and straight, progna¬ 
thous skull, with well-developed superciliary ridges. Example: The blacks found in 
Australia and in the Deccan, and perhaps the ancient Egyptians. The mongoloid 
group—yellowisli-brown or reddish-brown skin, dark eyes, long, black, and straight 
hair, me3aticephalic skull. Example: The Mongols, Chinese, Polynesians, Eskimos, 
and Americans. The xanthochroic group—pale skin, blue eyes, and abundant fair 
hair, skull mesaticephalic. Example: The Slavonians, Teutons, Scandinavians, and 
the fair Celtic-speaking people. The melanochroid group—pale-complexioned, dark 
eyes, hair long and black. Example: Iberians and black Celts and the Berbers. 

There are many objections to this classification. The form of the head, for example, 
is not always exact. If the Chinese and the Polynesians of the third group are mesa¬ 
ticephalic, the Eskimos are the most dolichocephalic to be found on the globe, and the 
Mongols among the most brachycephalic. 

The best classifications, apart from the monogenistic principle upon which it is 
based, is that of M. de Quatrefages. The eminent professor at the Museum of Paris 
regards the whole of the human races, “pure or regarded as such, ” as a single stem with 
three trunks—the white, the yellow, and the black—which are divided into branches, 
and these again into boughs, upon which the families divided into groups are grafted. 
The branches of the white trunk are the Aryan, the Semitic, and the Allophyle (Es- 
thonians, Caucasians, Ainos); those of the yellow trunk are the Mongolian or merid¬ 
ional, and the Ougrian or boreal; and those of the black trunk the Negrito, the Melane¬ 
sian, the African, and the Saab (Hottentots). As examples of the boughs we may 
mention the three of the Aryan branch—the Celt, the German, and the Slav; the two 
of the Semitic branch—the Semitic and the Libyan; the two of the Mongolian branch— 
the Sinican (Chinese, etc.); and the Turanian (Turks). As examples of families: 
The Chaldean, the Arabic, and the Amhara of the Semitic bough; the first furnishing 
the Hebrew group, the second the Hymyarite and Arabian groups, and the third the 
Abyssinian group, M. de Quatrefages admits, besides “the great races belonging 
more or less” to one of the three trunks. So among those of the yellow trunk, races 
“a elements juxtaposes” (the Japanese), and the races, “a elements fondus” (the 
Malayo-Polynesians). In fact, the majority of classifications go on progressing. We 
see them commencing timidly, then multiplying their divisions, and then descending 
to details. Questions as to geographical boundaries are the first to attract attention, 
then physical characteristics, languages, and subsequently records of every kind, 
both ethnic, historical, and archaeological. The defect of many is their exclusive 
character, as the classification of M. Fr. Muller, which is essentially linguistic. M. 
de Quatrefages, on the contrary, draws from all sources, and well weighs every question. 
Perhaps, however, he does not lay sufficient stress on physical characteristics, which 
ought in his eyes as a naturalist take precedence of every other. Enthnology, which 
classes peoples, naturally leaves them out of consideration; anthropology, which 
has to do with the distribution of races—like botany, which makes divisions and sub¬ 
divisions of the vegetable kingdom—takes them as its principal basis. 


[J. Topinard, Eliments d’anthropologie generate. Paris, 1885.] 

The yellow type comprises the Kalmoucks, Samoyedes, Bouriats, Tchsuktchis, 
Giliaks, Aleuts, Goreans, Esquimo, Japanese, Chinese, Thibetans, Asiatic Malays, 
Travidians, and the Indo-Chinese (p. 346). (This work gives also notes on the earlier 
classification.) 


[Anthropology. Dr. Paul Topinard, curator of the Museum of the Anthropological Society of Paris, etc. 

1878.] 

THE MONGOLIAN TYPE. 

The Mongolian type corresponds to that of the yellow races in general. Its name 
is derived from a small tribe to the north of the desert of Gobi, near the Kara-Kara 
Mountains, so sadly celebrated by Gengis-Khan at the commencement of the thirteenth 
century. It has not been shown that the traits of this horde now designated by the 
name of Mongol-Kalkas, best exhibit those of the Asiatic races scattered to the east 
of the Obi, the Caspian sea, and the Bay of Bengal; but custom, whether rightly or 
wrongly, has adopted the name. The general characters of the type are the following: 

The skin is of a pale yellowish color, more or less tawny, not mixed either with red 
or brown. The hair is straight, stiff, somewhat long and black, its transverse section 
being more or less round and large. The beard is scanty as well as the whiskers, and 
the hair on the upper lip consists of two delicate pencils, which are sometimes long. 




JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


59 


The body is more or less bare. The head is thick, sometimes high, sometimes short, 
its cranial capacity being between that of the negro and that of the European. Its 
summit is sometimes flat, sometimes raised into a crest antero-posteriorly, correspond¬ 
ing to the sagittal suture. The superciliary arches and the glabella are very slightly 
marked, the interval between the orbits is considerable. The face on the whole is 
flat, as if crushed in everywhere, and broader about the situation of the ckeekbones, 
the external and anterior borders of which look upward and outward (p. 471). 


[The Races of Man and Their Geographical Distribution. From the German of Oscar Peschel. London, 

1876.] 

The hairy covering of other parts of the body is more or less abundant, but is some¬ 
times wanting in both sexes. The covering most rarely disappears about parts of 
generation. Its scantiness or entire absence in North Asiatic Mongols, in American 
and Malay families, as well as in Hottentots and Bushmen, afford some of the most 
persistent and best authenticated racial characters (p. 96). 

* *. * Beyond all the nations of the world the Ainos, the inhabitants of Jezo, 
Saghalian, and the Kurilies have had the reputation, since the visit of La Perouse, of 
possessing an almost animal-like covering of hair on the upper part of the body. 
Recent observers have considerably modified this exaggeration, and it appears that 
the Ainos could not even be compared with European sailors. Wilmhelm Heine 
found the beards of the Ainos only 5 or 6 inches long, the chest and neck were bald, 
and only in a single individual were seen a few tufts of hair on the above-named parts. 
Nevertheless, even this moderate degree of hairiness in the neighborhood of such 
beardless people as the Japanese and Chinese is perplexing when we try to place the 
Ainos in our division of races, for we are obliged to reckon the appearance of hair on 
the body among the most persistent distinctive marks of human races (p. 97). 


in. KOREANS AND JAPANESE. 

In addition to the people discussed in the last chapter (Chinese), the inhabitants 
of the peninsula of Korea and of the Japanese Archipelago have the characters of the 
Mongolian race. The Japanese, whose index of breadth is 76, are mesocephals, while 
the height of their skulls almost equals the breadth. It is only the polysyllabic char¬ 
acter of their languages which prevents their being placed in one group with the 
Chinese and Malayo-Chinese. Their language is nearer the Altaic type, for they have 
the same loose combination of the morphological elements and have other rules of 
verbal structure in common. In these fundamental features the Japanese language 
corresponds so accurately with the Korean that the two may have had a common origin, 
but our present knowledge does not enable us to say that this must necessarily be the 
case. 

The Japanese migrated from the continent to their present abode and afterwards 
peopled the Loochoo Islands farther to the south. From Nippon and the southern 
islands they drove out the aborigines, in all probability Ainos, who now hold their own 
only at Yezo and the Kuriles. Ethnology can not dwell long on the Japanese, though 
they are an intellectually gifted people and easily assimilate the improvements of 
foreign civilization (p. 375). 

It is far more difficult to define the position of the third race, which has given itself 
the name of Aino or Ainu, the people. As we have already stated, they were the 
oldest inhabitants of the Japanese island, but are now met with only in Yezo. With 
them must be classed the inhabitants of southern Saghalien, of the Kurile Islands, 
and the Giliaks on the lower Amoor and in northern Saghalien. Their language has 
been pronounced akin to the Japanese, but without sufficient reason. 

At the sitting of the Anthropological Society of Berlin, December 16, 1871, Herr 
von Brandt, the German consul in Japan, exhibited photographs of Ainos, the expres¬ 
sion of whose faces was very like that of the Japanese. The inhabitants of the island 
of Paramushir at the southern point of Kamitshatka, who speak a Kurilian dialect, 
have “obliquely slit eyes,” which is one of the most easily recognizable characters 
of the Mongolian race. The skulls of these people have almost the same index of 
breadth as those of the Japanese, namely, 76-78.8; but their index of height, 69-76, 
proves to be considerably lower, though this is not a very important difference. We 
are far more puzzled by their luxuriant growth of beard, the bushy, curly hair of the 
head and general hirsuteness, which latter, although not more abundant than in 




60 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


Europeans, is highly significant in the midst of smooth-skinned races. This pecu¬ 
liarity alone would suffice to separate the Ainos from other Asiatics as a distinct 
race, did not all our information respecting them depend on such scanty and cursory 
statements that only later and better-instructed ethnologists will be able to decide as 
to their position. It is not quite impossible that they may be related to the Aeta, 
for the Asiatic Papuans may have spread across the Loochoo Islands to the Kuriles. 
We do not make this conjecture with any confidence, but only in order that the dialect 
of the Aeta may be compared with the Aino languages. It is only when this investi¬ 
gation has led to some result, whether affirmative or negative, that their true position 
can be more satisfactorily assigned to the Aino (p. 388). 


[Jeffries, John P., The Natural History of the Human Races. New York, 1869.] 

This type (Mongolian) comprises many families and nations, of which the Chinese 
and Japanese are the most prominent representatives. The other leading families 
are Mongols proper, Finns, Lapps, Tartars, Basques, Esquimaux, Koreans, Kalmucks, 
Gypsies, Kamschatdales, and some of the families of the American Indians (p. 146). 

The Japanese occupy a group of large islands in the Pacific Ocean east of China, 
their whole territory consisting of about 260,000 square miles. The people of Japan 
are representatives of two types: The Mongolian and Malay, the Mongolian being 
very largely in the majority. They resemble the Chinese, but are of better form and 
larger. Their complexion is yellow; nose short and flat; head broad; hair thin and 
black. This is as the Mongolian Japanese appear. The Malays are different, resem¬ 
bling the Siamese and people of Malacca more than the Chinese, their complexion 
being as dark almost as the Sandwich Islanders (p. 148). 


[The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, translated and edited from the Latin, 
German, and French originals by Thomas Bendyshe. London, 1865.] 

* * * Thg second variety (Mongolian) comprises that of the rest of Asia, which 
lies beyond the Ganges, and the part lying beyond the Caspian Sea and the river Obi 
toward Nova Zembla. The inhabitants of this country are distinguished by being 
of browAish color, more or lest verging to the olive, straight face, narrow eyelids, and 
scanty hair. This whole variety may be subdivided into two races, northern and 
southern; of which one may embrace China, the Korea, the Kingdoms of Tonkin, 
Pegu, Siam, and Ava, using rather monosyllabic languages, * * *; and the other 
the nations of northern Asia, the Ostiaks, and the other Siberians, the Tunguses, the 
Mantchoos, the Tartars, the Calmucks, and the Japanese. (P. 99, note 4.) 

Racial varieties of color.—* * * The second is the yellow, olive tinge, a sort of 
color halfway between grains of wheat and cooked oranges, or the dry and exsiccated 
rind of lemons; very usual in the Mongolian nations (p. 209). 

Principal varieties of hair. —■* ** * The second black, stiff, straight, and scanty; 
such as is common to the Mongolian and American nations (p. 224). 

The national face. —* * * Face wide, at the same time flat and depressed; the 
parts, therefore, indistinct and running into one another. Interspace between the 
eyes, or glabella, smooth, very wide. Nose flattened. Cheeks usually rounded, 
projecting outward. Opening of the eyelids narrow, linear (yeux brides). Chin 
somewhat prominent. This is the countenance common to the Mongolian nations 

(pp. 226, 228). 

Racial varieties of skull. —■* * * The head almost square, the malar bones pro¬ 
jecting outward; the glabella and the little bones of the flattened nose lying in almost 
the same horizontal plane with the malar bones; scarcely any superciliary ridge; 
narrow nostrils; the fossa malaris only gently curved; the alveolar ridge obtusely 
arched in front; the chin slightly prominent. This form of skull is peculiar to the 
Mongolian nations (pp. 237, 238). 

Legs. —Some difference in the proportion and appearance of the legs is known to 
exist in certain nations. Thus the Indians are remarkable for the length of their 
legs, the Mongolians, on the other hand, for their shortness (p. 250). 

Five principal varieties of mankind may be reckoned. As, however, even among 
these arbitrary kinds of divisions, one is said to be better and preferable to another; 
after a long and attentive consideration, all mankind, as far as it is at present known 
to us, seems to me as if it may best, according to natural truth, be divided into the 
five following varieties, which may be designated and distinguished from each other 
by the names Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malay (p. 264). 




JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


61 


Mongolian variety.— Color yellow; hair black, stiff, straight, and scanty; head almost 
square; face broad, at the same time flat and depressed, the parts therefore less dis¬ 
tinct, as it were, running into one another; glabella flat, very broad; nose small, 
apish; cheeks usually globular, prominent outwardly; the opening of the eyelids 
narrow, linear; chin slightly prominent (p. 265). 


fj. C. Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Mankind, 3d ed. London. 1844. 5 vols.] 

The Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese “are, if we regard their physical characters, 
one sort or stock of people. No human races bear a stronger resemblance to each other 
than the Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese; they all have the same physical type.” 
(Yol. 4, p. 518.) ' 

[Natural History of Man. London. 1855.] 

The Chinese and the Koreans and the Japanese belong to the same type of human 
species as the nations of high Asia. (Vol. 1, p. 231.) 

The Japanese belong to the same type as the Chinese. They resemble them in 
many particulars. (Ibid., p. 234.) 


[The Encylcopedia Americana, vol. 19, p. 355.] 

Mongolian race: A general name applied to a majority of the people of Asia. In 
ethnology, the term is used for one of the five great races of the world discriminated 
and named by Blumenbach, and adopted by Cuvier when he reduced Blumenbach’s 
five to three. The head of the Mongolian is square; the face flattish, nearly as broad 
as long, the parts not well distinguished from each other; the eyelids narrow, 
obliquely turned up at their outer angle; the space between the eyes flat and broad, 
the nose flat, the cheeks projecting, the chin somewhat prominent. The hair is 
straight, the color black, that of the face and body yellowish (sometimes inaccurately 
called olive, which implies an admixture of green). The race includes not merely the 
natives of Mongolia properly so called, but the Tartars, the Chinese, the Japanese, the 
Cochin Chinese, the Burmese, the Tamuls, the Turks, and the Finns. 


[The Encyclopedia Americana, vol. 2, p. 21.] 

SOMATIC CHARACTERS. 

One of the great problems under this head is to know man’s zoological position among 
mammals. The classification of existing men is the great prerequisite to such inves¬ 
tigations. Though as a mere proposition this seems a small task, it proves to be one of 
very great difficulty, so difficult that even now there is no generally accepted classifica¬ 
tion. The trouble arises from the almost hopeless blending and intergrading of all 
the known types, or the existence of many extremely variable characters. There is, 
for instance, no one somatic character that will consistently segregate mankind; 
yet there are some, such as hair, color of skin, head form, face form, and bodily pro¬ 
portions, that almost rise to that level. Of these the most consistent is the character 
of the hair, of which three gross types are recognized: Straight, wavy, and woolly; 
each with a distinct cross-section and associated peculiarities. On this basis all living 
peoples fall into three large groups: 

1. Straight hair (leiotrichi), the Asian-American group. 

2. Wavy hair (cymotrichi), the Polynesian-European group. 

3. Woolly hair (ulotrichi), the Australian-African group. 

Though the general reader will find many proposed classifications in anthropological 
literature, all show a tendency to recognize this three-part grouping. Further, the 
color skin, the shape of the head, and the profile of the face are found to be in frequent 
association with type of hair. In consequence we have such tentative groupings as 
that proposed by Giddings: 

“I. The Australian-African group. —Characteristics: Black skin, dolichocephalic 
(long-headed), prognathic, woolly or frizzly haired (cross-section of hair very ellip¬ 
tical). Area of distribution: Australia and Africa, south of the Equator. 

“II. The Polynesian-European group. —Characteristics: Fair skin, mesocephalic, 
orthognathic, straight or wavy hair (cross-section slightly elliptical). Area of distri¬ 
bution: Broad ^one from Polynesia northwestward through southwestern Asia and 
northern Africa and most of the continent of Europe. 


3887—22-5 






62 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


“III. The Asian-American group. —Characteristics: Yellow or red skin, brachy, 
cephalic (broad headed), narrow eyed, lank or straight haired (cylindrical in cross 
section). Area of distribution: Eastern Asia and western America, chiefly north of 
the Equator .along the semicircular shore line of Asia and America.” 


[The Encyclopedia Americana, vol 10, 1918, p. 552.] 

THE ASIATIC OR MONGOLIAN RACE. 

The Asian or Mongolian race is made up of two divisions—the Sinitic and Sibiric. 
The Sinitic branch includes the Chinese, Tibetans, and the inhabitants of Anam, 
Siam, Burma, and Cochin-China. The Chinese have occupied their territory from 
quite early times. They have developed a peculiar civilization, and in some par¬ 
ticulars have reached quite a high stage of culture. While there is considerable 
difference of opinion whether the arts of ancient China developed there or were 
acquired from the Aryans to the westward, it seems probable that in a great measure 
at least they were indigenous. 

The Sibiric branch of this race is largely located north of the mountains of central 
Asia, ranging with the Arctic Circle from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. The 
six groups are the Tungusic, reaching from northern China toward the Arctic Ocean 
and to Kamchatka. The Mongolic, occupying the vast highlands west of Manchuria, 
Genghis-Khan, and later, Tamerlane, established two of the wide extended Mongol 
empires. The Tartaric, another highland group, has spread from Turkestan in several 
directions. The Turk is the most conspicuous representative, though much mixed 
with other races. The Finnic is a group of Mongols occupying northern Europe. 
It is represented there by the Finns and Lapps, and farther south by the Magyars. 
From there it extends east to the Volga River. The rude tribes fringing the Arctic 
Ocean in eastern Siberia and reaching to the Pacific are grouped under the name 
Arctic. The Chukchis and Kamchatkans are of their number. The Japanese and 
Koreans constitute the Japanese group. The Japanese are the most progressive and 
advanced of the Asiatic race. 


[The Encyclopedia Americana, vol. 15, 1919, p. 628.] 

ETHNOLOGY. 

The limit of a nation and that of a race do not necessarily coincide. While a nation 
may consist of two or more racial elements, one and the same division of a race may be 
found in different countries. We see both cases exemplified in the people of Japan. 
Extending from the Kurile Islands and the southern half of Saghalien in the north of 
Formosa in the south, the Empire naturally contains several racial elements. Though 
some of them are peculiar to the land, others are the small branches spreading from 
the main stems of peoples which are to be found in other countries. 

Besides these existing populations we must count among the inhabitants of Japan 
the prehistoric people, who have left innumerable stone-age objects throughout the 
greater part of the country. Thus, from ethnological points of view, Japan is remarka¬ 
ble for containing peoples of exceedingly different character in a comparatively 
limited area. We will now describe the constituent people under respective headings. 

Prehistoric stone-age people: Stone implements and potteries found in the northern 
portions of the Kurile Islands and those found in Formosa were evidently made by 
the forefathers of the present inhabitants of those places. Relics of different types 
and of different kinds have been discovered from several stone-age sites widely dis¬ 
tributed in the lands lying between Loo-Choo and the southern portions of the Kurile 
Islands and Saghalien. As these relics form a group by themselves, and as no connect¬ 
ing links exist between them and those found in the two extreme places above 
mentioned, we are led to the conclusion that there must have been a stone-age people 
differing both from the aborignes of Formosa and from the Kurile Ainu. 

From shell mounds—the refuse heaps left by the stone-age people—human bones 
are sometimes found often broken and scattered, like the bones of wild animals, 
showing that cannibalism was practiced by the people. As it is very difficult to obtain 
entire skeletons, special burial places being almost unknown, the knowledge of the 
osteological character of the people is very limited. The only conclusion which can 
be drawn from such insufficient materials is that the forms of these bones do not agree 
with those of the Ainu or the Japanese, who are the successors, so to speak, of the 
stone-age people in Yezo and the main island of Japan respectively. 




JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


63 


In general the relics found in the northern districts are comparatively new, showing 
the latest movement of the stone-age people to have been from the south to the north, 
that is toward Yezo. Among the Ainu living in the island just named, there are 
traditions that those who made stone implements and potteries were entirely different 
from the Ainu themselves or from the Japanese, and that this pre-Ainu race migrated 
northward as the Ainu increased in number. The Ainu gave several names to the race, 
Koropokgurn being one. Supposing the traditions to be correct, the footprints of the 
stone-age people must be sought for in Saghalien and the regions situated on the north 
and the northeast of the northern part of the Kurile Islands. According to the Sag¬ 
halien Ainu, the stone-age people called themselves Tonchi, and lived there about 
eight generations back. So far as known, the Chukchi, the Aleuts, and the Eskimo 
are those who seem to have had close connections with the stone-age people. Among 
the three mentioned, the Eskimo are most intimately related to the latter, at least in. 
manners, customs and handiwork. This conclusion is obtained from the minute 
investigations concerning the stone-age sites and relics. 

Present inhabitants: In Saghalien there are the Giliaks, the Orokkos, and the Ainu. 
In the Kurile Islands and Yezo, the Ainu with some local peculiarities are found. 
The Bonin Islands are inhabited by the naturalized Europeans. The aboriginal 
tribes and the Chinese immigrants in Formosa are now Japanese subjects. Having 
these people in the northern and the southern parts of the empire, the Japanese 
proper occupy the chief central islands, and thence spread in both directions. The 
natives of Loo-Choo have no distinctive ethnoliogical peculiarities, and are to be 
considered as forming a branch of the Japanese. The Giliaks and the Orokkos are 
found not only in Japanese but also in Russian territory, and both of them belong to 
the Tungus, who are chiefly distributed in the northern part of Asia. The aborigines 
of Formosa are Malayans, the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands showing a strong 
resemblance to them. Geographically considered, the large and small islands of Japan 
form a kind of stepping stone extending from the north to the south. Just as we now 
find the Tungus and the Malayan at the two ends, so in remote times the chief central 
islands of Japan might have been inhabited by the northern and the southern races. 
Moreover, some people might have come from the continent by way of the peninsula 
of Korea. According to traditions and records, we are led to believe that such was 
actually the case. 

The average height of Japanese men is about 5 feet 3 inches. Cephalic index, 80; 
hair, straight and black; iris, dark brown; complexion, very light brown, often white 
in better classes; face, some narrow, some broad; beard, some full, some small. 

Among the Japanese proper, there are some who have the Korean physiognomy, 
while others show the Malay traits. Some are so hairy that it is difficult to distinguish 
them from the Ainu. The Japanese language is closely related to the Korean. In 
Japanese manners and customs some likeness to those of Korea and Malay are found. 

It is quiet probable that the Ainu, Malay and continental elements are the chief, 
though not necessarily the only, constituents of the Japanese. (See Mental Char¬ 
acteristics of the Japanese; the Development and Constitution of Society in Japan.”) 


[Baron Dairoku Kikuchi, M. A., D. Sc., LL. D., In Enc. Brit., 11th ed., vol. 15, pp. 165 and 275.] 

The most,exhaustive anthropological study of the Japanese has been made by Dr, E. 
Baelz (emeritus professor of medicine in the Imperial University of Tokyo), who 
enumerates the following subdivisions of the race inhabiting the Japanese islands. 
The first and most important is the Manchu-Korean type: that is to say,.the type 
which prevails in north China and in Korea. This is seen specially among the upper 
classes in Japan. Its characteristics are exceptional tallness combined with slender¬ 
ness and elegance of figure; a face somewhat long without any special prominence of 
the cheek-bones but having more or less oblique eyes; an aquiline nose; a slightly 
receding chin; largish upper teeth; a long neck; a narrow chest; a long trunk, and 
delicately shaped, small hands with long slender fingers. The most plausible hy¬ 
pothesis is that men of this typo are descendants of Korean colonists who, in prehistoric 
times, settled in the province of Izumo, on the west coast of Japan, having made their 
way thither from the Korean peninsula by the island of Oki, being carried by the cold 
current which flows along the eastern coast of Korea. The second type is the Mongol. 
It is not very frequently found in Japan, perhaps because, under favorable social 
conditions it tends to pass into the Manchu-Korean type. Its representative has a 
broad face, with prominent cheek bones, oblique eyes, a nose more or less flat, and a 



64 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


wide mouth. The figure is strongly and squarely built, but this last characteristic 
can scarcely be called typical. 

There is no satisfactory theory as to the route by which the Mongols reached Japan, 
but it is scarcely possible to doubt that they found their way thither at one time. 
More important than either of these types as an element of the Japanese nation is the 
Malay. Small in stature, with a well-knit frame, the cheek bones prominent, the 
face generally round, the nose and neck short, a marked tendency to prognathism, 
the chest broad and well developed, the trunk long, the hands small and delicate-^- 
this Malay type is found in nearly all the islands along the east coast of the Asiatic 
continent as well as in southern China and in the extreme southwest of the Korean 
peninsula. Carried northward by the warm current, known as the Kuro Shiwo, the 
Malays seem to have landed in Kiushiu—the most southerly of the main Japanese 
islands—whence they ultimately pushed northward and conquered their Manchu- 
Korean predecessors, the Izumo colonists. None of the above three, however, can 
be regarded as the earliest settlers in Japan. Before them all was a tribe of immi¬ 
grants who appear to have crossed from northeastern Asia at an epoch when the sea 
had not yet dug broad channels between the continent and the adjacent islands. 
These people—the Ainu—are usually spoken of as the aborigines of Japan. They 
once occupied the whole country, but were gradually driven northward by the 
Manchu-Koreans and the Malays until only a mere handful of them survived in the 
northern island of Yezo. Like the Malay and the Mongol types, they are short and 
thickly built, but unlike either they have prominent brows, bushy locks, round, 
deep-set eyes, long divergent lashes, straight noses, and much hair on the fac.e and 
the body. In short, the Ainu suggest much closer affinity with Europeans than does 
any other of the types that go to make up the population of Japan. It is not to be 
supposed, however, that these traces of different elements indicate any lack of homo¬ 
geneity in the Japanese race. Amalgamation has been completely effected in the 
course of long centuries, and even the Ainu, though the small surviving remnant of 
them now live apart, have left a trace upon their conquerors. 

The typical Japanese of the present day has certain marked pvhsical peculiarities. 
In the first place, the ratio of the height of his head to the length of his body is greater 
than it is in Europeans. The Englishman’s head is often one-eighth of the length of 
his body or even less, and in continental Europeans, as a rule, the ratio does not amount 
to one-seventh; but in the Japanese it exceeds the latter figure. In all nations men of 
short stature have relatively large heads, but in the case of the Japanese there appears 
to be some racial reason for the phenomenon. Another striking feature is shortness of 
legs relatively to length of trunk. In northern Europeans the leg is usually much 
more than one-half of the body’s length, but in Japanese the ratio is one-half or even 
less; so that whereas the Japanese, when seated, looks almost as tall as an European, 
there may be a great difference between their statures when both are standing. This 
special feature has been attributed to the Japanese habit of kneeling instead of sitting, 
but investigation shows that it is equally marked in the working classes who pass most 
of their time standing. In Europe the same physical traits—relative length of head 
and shortness of legs—distinguish the central race (Alpine) from the Teutonic, and 
seem to indicate an affinity between the former and the Mongols. It is in the face, 
however, that we find specially distinctive traits, namely, in the eyes, the eye lashes, 
the cheek bones, and the beard. Not that the eyeball itself differs from that of an oc¬ 
cidental. The difference consists in the fact that “the socket of the eye is compara¬ 
tively small and shallow, and the osseous ridges at the brows being littie marked, the 
eye is less deeply set than in the European. In fact, seen in profile, forehead and upper 
lip often form an unbroken line.” 

Then, again, the shape of the eye, as modeled by the lids, shows a striking peculi¬ 
arity. For whereas the open eye is almost invariably horizontal in the European, 
it is often oblique in the Japanese on account of the higher level of the upper corner. 
“But even apart from obliqueness, the shape of the corners is peculiar in the Mon¬ 
golian eye. The inner corner is partly or entirely covered by a fold of the upper lid 
continuing more or less into the lower lid. This fold often covers also the whole free 
rim of the upper lid, so that the insertion of the eyelashes is hidden,” and the opening 
between the lids is so narrowed as to disappear altogether at the moment of laughter. 
As for the eyelashes, not only are they comparatively short and sparse, but also they 
converge instead of diverging, so that whereas in a European the free ends of the lashes 
are farther distant from each other than their roots, in a Japanese they are nearer 
together. Prominence of cheek bones is another special feature, but it is much com¬ 
moner in the lower than in the upper classes, where elongated faces may almost be 
said to be the rule. Finally, there is marked paucity of hair on the face "of the aver¬ 
age Japanese—apart from the Ainu—and what hair there is is nearly always straight. 
It is not to be supposed, however, that because the Japanese is short of stature and 


JAPANESE IN HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES. 


65 


often finely molded he lacks either strength or endurance. On the contrary, he 
possesses both in a marked degree, and his deftness of finger is not less remarkable 
than the suppleness and activity of his body. 

******* 
Restrictions upon Japanese emigrants to the United States and to Australia are 
irritating to the Japanese, because it is a discrimination against them as belonging to 
the '‘yellow” race, whereas it has been their ambition to raise themselves above the 
level of the eastern nations to an equality with the western nations, although they 
can not change the color of their skin. 


[Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., vol. 9, p. 851.J 

Mongolic or yellow man prevails over the vast area lying east of a line drawn from 
Lapland to Siam. His physical characteristics are a short squat body, a yellowish- 
brown or coppery complexion, hair lank, straight and black, flat small nose, broad 
skull, usually without prominent brow ridges, and black, oblique eyes. Of the 
typical Mongolic races the chief are the Chinese, Tibetans, Burmese, Siamese; the 
Finnic group of races occupying northern Europe, such as Finns, Lapps, Samoyedes, 
and Ostyaks, and the Arctic Asiatic group represented by the Chukchis and Kamcha- 
dales; the Tunguses, Gilyaks, and Golds north and the Mongols proper west of Man¬ 
churia; the pure Turkic peoples and the Japanese and Koreans. Less typical, but 
with the Mongolic elements so predominant as to warrant inclusion, are the Malay 
peoples of the eastern archipelago. Lastly, though differentiated in many ways from 
the true Mongol, the American races from the Eskimo to the Fuegians must be reck¬ 
oned in the yellow division of mankind. 

'Thereupon the committee adjourned.) 


o 


























































































































































































































































































































LB Mr 23 






















































































































































































t 




































































PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATION 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724) 779-2111 
















' 


























































































